Jim Parsons Comes Out in NY Times Article

Congratulations to Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons for officially coming out via a New York Times article today.

The article, an interview about Parsons’ upcoming role in a rare Broadway revival of Harvey, states simply:

“”The Normal Heart” resonated with him on a few levels: Mr. Parsons is gay and in a 10-year relationship, and working with an ensemble again onstage was like nourishment, he said.”

I’m particularly moved by the casualness of the coming out buried on page 3 of a lengthy article. Parsons will be playing the beloved Elwood P. Dowd in the upcoming revival – a role made famous by the late, great Jimmy Stewart.

While I’m of course looking forward to this performance, my favorite appearance by Parsons will always be in “Man, or Muppet” from last year’s The Muppets.

Enjoy! And thank you for being an inspiration to all the young gay people living in places where it’s not so easy to tell people who they are.

BULLY: The Only Thing That’s Changed is the Part in His Hair

When Mitt Romney was 18 years old, he was a bully. A story in the Washington Post goes into great detail about a time when a high school-aged Romney lead a screaming mob of students to chase, pin to the floor and then physically assault a fellow student they assumed to be gay. They took a pair of scissors and chopped off his hair after Romney observed “He can’t look like that. That’s wrong! Just look at him!”

We’ve heard this story all over the internet, on every news station and paper for the past few days. Romney has of course, brushed off the incident. “I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school, and some might have gone too far…” In another interview, Romney laughed through his responses when questioned on his participation in the anti-gay assault. He also found it funny when he was questioned about teasing a closeted gay student by responding “Atta Girl!” to the young man’s responses in the classroom. He impressively remembered the detail that he didn’t think of his fellow student as gay, but strangely couldn’t remember that time he chased him down and chopped off all his hair.

Those defending Romney are parroting his responses, passing off what a kid today would get arrested for as silly teenage pranks. And it’s true. Kids do stupid things. As a friend put it today, “that’s why kids are tried in court as kids.” It certainly doesn’t excuse their behavior, but we have a cultural understanding that growing up means maturing and evolving in your views and your actions. The problem here is that Romney hasn’t evolved. His bullying of gay people has continued well-into his adulthood. He may not be leading mobs to assault defenseless teenagers, but he’s certainly working to make sure we remain pinned to the floor, the scissors posed just next to our faces.

As Governor of Massachusetts, Romney had to make some compromises. On several occasions, he purported to support the LGBT community including the endorsement of an LGBT Youth Rally on Boston Common, his support of Gay Pride (which his campaign has thoroughly denied despite the evidence), and a declaration of support for full federal equality for gays & lesbians when he ran for Senate against Ted Kennedy.

What we didn’t see then though, according to a 2006 Boston Globe article, was a virulently anti-gay Romney seeking to curtail the state’s initiatives to support LGBT youth:

“Angered that his name appeared on a press release touting a gay pride parade, Governor Mitt Romney moved yesterday to curtail the activities of a 14-year-old advisory commission on gay and lesbian youth.

The commission chairwoman, Kathleen M. Henry, said she was called yesterday by Beth Myers, the governor’s chief of staff, who told her that the governor planned to issue an executive order ”revoking our existence” and creating another youth commission whose purview would be all of the state’s youth, not just gays and lesbians. The commission would have all new members, she said.”

His anti-gay actions as governor of Massachusetts didn’t end there. He went on to veto funding for “intervention services and crisis housing for sexual violence in the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community,” according to a 2006 article in the Patriot Ledger. In 2003 & 2004, Romney also vetoed funding for suicide prevention and intervention efforts in the state, according to government documents.

As has also been recently discovered that Romney made a $10,000 contribution to the anti-gay hate group, National Organization for Marriage (NOM). The contribution was to aid NOM in their efforts to take marriage rights away from California citizens. Strangely enough, NOM failed to report the Governor’s contribution and an investigation has been demanded.

Romney also joked about the time his father shut down a factory in Michigan, leaving hundreds out of work.

Romney’s lack of respect for the life of those he sees beneath him doesn’t end with gay youth and those who wish to marry. Romney has also brushed off his actions as a dog owner when he strapped his Irish Setter’s crate to the roof of their station wagon for hours of driving. In 1983, the family drove from Boston to Ontario, Canada with the dog defacating all over himself and sitting in the crate for hours. The Romneys pulled over, hosed the dog off and put the now-wet Irish Setter back in the crate and continued their journey. When asked if he’d do it again, Romney laughed and responded “well, not with all the attention it’s received.”

Romney doesn’t mind actively harming others, whether it be pinning a person to the ground and assaulting him with scissors or  clearly taking the life of your own dog for granted. Romney’s responses to his horrific actions as both a young person and an adult clearly prove that he hasn’t grown up. Yes, kids can be horrible and people make mistakes, and we forgive them. But when a man who spends his entire life taking pleasure and even glee in seeing others suffer, we don’t excuse that. And we certainly don’t elect that man to be the most powerful bully person in the world.

Romney ‘Seeks to Establish Full Equality for America’s Gays & Lesbians’…in 1994

Photo by DonkeyHotey on Flickr. Licensed under Creative Commons.

The fact that Mitt Romney’s opinions change more frequently than a traffic light is no surprise to anyone. But as the marriage debate continues to heat up, and as he makes claims that his opposition to equality is somehow the same stance he’s always had, it seems we need to once again, check his record.

Yesterday, Romney said:

“When these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts I indicated my view, which is I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender and I don’t favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name.”

Now, I’d like to ask Governor Romney what he thinks the definition of the word “equality” is. If it’s “the state or quality of being equal” as Dictionary.com tells us, it would seem these are not the same values he held before.

On October 6, 1994, when Romney was running against Ted Kennedy for Senate, he issued a rather heartfelt and supportive letter to the Members of the Log Cabin Club of Massachusetts.

“I am more convinced now than ever before that as we seek to establish full equality for America’s gays and lesbians, I will provide more effective leadership than my opponent.

“I believe we can and we must do better. If we are to achieve the goals we share, we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern. My opponent cannot do this. I can and will.

As I mentioned, this is far from breaking news and this letter has been circulated far & wide at this point. I just couldn’t let yesterday’s comments go by without pointing out his apparent backwards evolution from support for “full equality” to no protections whatsoever.

We Will Not Be Erased.

Tom Bridegroom & Shane Bitney Crone

It’s been said that telling our stories is what will make the biggest difference in the end. It’s easy to see the statistics that have changed since more and more people have come out and more and more of our loved ones have changed their minds about support for our equality.

Tom Bridegroom was the host of MTV’s The X Effect in 2006 and 2007. One year ago today, while photographing a model, Tom fell off a rooftop to his death. While his passing was discussed on a handful of websites and amongst friends and fans, very little has been said about his relationship with Shane Bitney Crone.

As any story about a couple that had been together 6 years and then broken apart by tragedy would be, their story is heartbreaking. But what’s different about Tom & Shane’s story is that they were set to marry. And while I could write the story here, Shane has found the courage to tell the story himself 0 in the hopes of spreading the word about the inequalities we face and the irreparable harm it does to our families.

Thank you Shane for your bravery and for telling your story so that others may live to see a day when things are different.

Please watch. And share as much as you can.

Gap Shows Paul Ryan the Door

Congressman Paul Ryan

Earlier this week, an interesting item showed up on Queerty. It seems Gap, Inc., a longtime friend to the LGBT community was hosting a fundraising breakfast for anti-gay Congressman Paul Ryan.

Ryan is best known for his budget which would drastically cut medicare, social security, possibly double interest rates on student loans and allow for the 1% to divide the country’s wealth gap even further.

Ryan also carries an anti-LGBT voting record, including a vote to enshrine anti-gay discrimination in the US Constitution by prohibiting marriage equality and a vote to prohibit DC gay parents from adopting children.

While the fundraiser had been announced and the location was part of the invitation (Gap, Inc. Headquarters in San Francisco), we researched further and discovered a more interesting story.

When word first began getting around about the fundraiser, LGBT people started making calls to Gap, Inc. to complain about the company’s seeming endorsement of the anti-gay candidate. Considering most of my own wardrobe comes from Gap subsidiary, Banana Republic, it was also important to me.

On Friday afternoon, I contacted Gap, Inc. and was sent to literally dozens of different voicemail boxes. I left messages for two different people in their media relations department and then looked back to the invitation from the event, posted at San Francisco Chronicle. A contact number for Paul Ryan’s event planner was listed on the invite, so I thought I’d try them. I spoke to Kristin Hueter, who effusively spoke about the event as one of her firm’s most successful. She told me that they were no longer going to be using Gap, Inc. Headquarters because the event sold-out and had become far too large for that location. She assured me that it was no longer an issue, and it seemed that the story I was going to post had become a non-story.

An hour later, I received a call back from Edie Kissco from Gap, Inc. I’d left a lengthy message for her outlining what I hoped to speak with her about and the moment I answered the phone she said “Let me just start by saying that the Paul Ryan event will no longer be taking place at Gap, Inc. Edie went on and told me that Gap, Inc. had contacted the organizer and asked them to find a new location.” Another call from Gap, Inc. comes in, this time from  Stacy Rollo – also in media relations. I told her what Paul Ryan’s event planner relayed to me and she responded

“That is absolutely untrue…we did not know when the event was booked that it was a fundraiser for Congressman Ryan. Once we heard what this event would be, we immediately contacted the planners and asked them to find a different location.”

Gap’s Edie Kissco followed up via email:

“Gap Inc. is not hosting or organizing a fundraiser for Congressman Ryan.  The fundraiser is a private event, and the location of the event has been moved.  To say that Gap Inc. was or is hosting a fundraiser for Congressman Paul Ryan is factually incorrect.”

“Gap Inc. and our brands have a very strong record on LGBTQ community issues as shown by our perfect rating by the Human Rights Campaign annual Corporate Equality Index for seven years in a row.  In addition, we are proud of the “Be One” Gap brand ads featuring a gay couple sharing a Gap t-shirt. This ad is part of a “Be Your Own T” campaign which expresses different personalities, heritages, styles and passions.   (Incidentally, the men in the ad are a real couple).”

For your viewing pleasure, here’s the billboard unveiled yesterday in Los Angeles:

Gap’s “Be One” Campaign (photo by Chris Votaw)