Youth Radio - Topic: gay

Gun Hill Road's Soulful Young Star

rgee — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 12:21:23 -0500

In Gun Hill Road, director Rashaad Ernesto Green has written a loving, complex portrait of a Bronx family in struggle. The patriarch, Enrique (Esai Morales), has been in prison for three years. In that time, his wife (played by Judi Reyes of Scrubs fame) has had an affair. But Enrique, feels most betrayed by the changes in his son Michael, who’s in the middle of a transition to becoming a teen girl.

Director Rashaad Ernesto Green said he was inspired by a member of his family who went through something similar as the father in the film. "I watched this family deteriorate…as an artist, I wanted to make a piece of art that didn’t necessarily give them all the answers, but at least pointed them in the way of love and acceptance," he said.

Green said he wanted the script to reflect a Latino family that's driven by their love for one other. It’s a relief, watching the movie, to see a man of color character who doesn’t immediately lurch into physically abuse when confronted with a transgender child, especially as you watch him dealing with his own sexual victimization in prison and the phobias that it produces.

Ultimately, there is violence in Enrique’s reaction to his son’s transformation. But Green was careful to present a man who’s acknowledging the impact of his absence. "He struggles within himself because his love is what sort of holds him to a higher standard of behavior. He doesn’t react like a monster per se.

Everything he does, even though skewed, is somehow out of love. He believes he needs to right his child, even though the child doesn’t need to be righted, because the child isn't doing anything wrong," he said.

Green acknowledged this is a progressive perspective that doesn't look even reflect what happened in his own family as it dealt with this issue. He said, "for Enrique, whose mentality has been shaped by the environment that he's come up in, by the Bronx, that's defined his sense of manhood, and what it is to be a man, I wanted to draw a family that has a realistic response."

The movie follows Enrique’s son Michael as she becomes Vanessa. The actress, Harmony Santana, made her movie debut with this film. Often, straight actors are cast as the opposite sex to play transgender people. Green wanted to find someone transgender to play the roles of Michel and Vanessa.

He said for months, he searched nightclubs, LGBT organizations, and dance workshops…and finally met Harmony Santana at a Queens pride parade where she was working the HIV prevention booth. "I went up to what I thought was a young Latino boy, someone who might fit the description of the character. She took off her sunglasses and I had to take a step back at how beautiful she was. She looked angelic, and she told me she was at the beginning of her transition."

Santana told Green she was Puerto Rican and Dominican, had lived in the Bronx, and had always dreamed of acting. It didn’t take very long for him to cast her. In one of the film’s most affecting scenes, the viewer sees Michael’s routine to physically transform himself into Vanessa, from bundling himself into lingerie, to pressing on nails and heels to enhancing her full features with lipstick and eyeshadow. "It’s one of those moments in the film where you’re in awe," Green reflected. "She’s not acting. You’re seeing right into the soul of someone who does this in their own lives…and you're getting absolute truth and authenticity in that moment."

Green said Santana’s transition in real life unfolded in an almost parallel rhythm to the transition she was portraying in the movie, and that it was incredible to watch her gain confidence as the character Vanessa. He says Santana is planning to visit her own father in the DR…so that he can show him who she is for the first time.

LGBTQ Kids In Foster Care Struggle To Find Homes

rgee — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:58:24 -0500

Foster care youth are three times more likely to end up in jail than to graduate from a four-year college, according to the LA Times. In a time when the education system is failing many American youth, foster care youth don’t have it easy. But for a certain group of foster care youth, it's hard enough just to find a family.

According to Family Builders, LGBTQ youth are over-represented in the foster care system and face a large amount of discrimination when they disclose their sexual orientation or gender identity. 33 percent, in fact, are rejected from their families when this happens, according to Family Builders, which is an organization in Oakland, CA working to connect foster youth with families.

Mother Jones reported last year that many foster parents refuse to accept a gay young person. But when you take in a young person at age two, there’s no way of knowing whether they are gay, straight, bisexual, or transgender. Jill Jacobs, executive director of Family Builders, said that there is no screening process for whether a family is homophobic.

“The Foster Care system is bifurcated by gender in the first place,” said Jacobs, meaning that in group home situations, girls and boys are separated. “Many kids that don’t fit gender norms. That’s challenged to begin with. … Often, they’re the last to be considered for families,” she added. “These are the children that need a family the most,” said Jacobs.

In Oakland, Family Builders works to get LGBTQ foster youth in safe, healthy homes. A lot of the families they end up working with are same sex families. “More than half of our families are gay families. But it’s not the full responsibility of the gay community to take on these kids. I’d like to push on traditional foster families - most are not welcoming to LGBT youth,” said Jacobs.

Many times young people come to Family Builders after being in difficult situations. "In a way, the LGBT piece is the easy piece. Often foster care youth referred to us are gender variant, but have also been in foster care for a long time. They have behavioral issues, mental health issues, they've been abused, or neglected," said Jacobs.

FAIR Education Act Passes: LGBT Lessons To Be Included In Curriculum

squevedo — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 18:56:09 -0500

What do Bayard Rustin, Eleanor Roosevelt, and James Baldwin have in common? Thanks to SB 48, a bill signed into law today by California Governor Jerry Brown, their contributions and those of other gay and lesbian historical figures will be recognized in California history textbooks, reports The Huffington Post. Though the textbooks will not be updated for another two to three years because of the budget crisis, the signing of the bill marks a milestone for the gay community which has often been excluded from or ignored in classrooms. Senator Mark Leno, who introduced the bill, hopes that acknowledging the struggles and accomplishments LGBTQ community will reduce the bullying that led to the tragic suicides of many gay youth this year.

"History should be honest," the governor said in a statement. "This bill revises existing laws that prohibit discrimination in education and ensures that the important contributions of Americans from all backgrounds and walks of life are included in our history books."

The LGBTQ community joins a long line of minorities that have been introduced to history books, such as those with disabilities, African-Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans. Not everyone is happy with this bill though. Benjamin Lopez, the legislative analyst and advocate of the Traditional Values Coalition said, "It’s a sad day for the state of California. We have failed at our core educational mission and yet we are now going to inject gay studies into the classrooms. It’s absurd and offensive.’’

California gets a pat on the back for the being the first state in the nation to include LGBTQ people in their history curriculum, and another pat on the back for a facet of this bill that some may be overlooking. Because of the passage of SB 48 , sexual orientation has been added to California’s anti-discrimination protections. That means that schools cannot be biased against LGBTQ students in school activities, instruction, and instructional materials.

In the next year, the strength and patience of the LGBTQ community will be tested. Commenters on the Huffington Post article about the law were eager to respond to the decision:

I'm a Christian and I think it is fine for them to document their expression, but then it also needs to be fair for Christians and Jews too! If we are talking about contributions to society in the name of their faith. For gays that is their religion because they can't keep hijacking other's faith and call the warped version right. We don't buy it either! So peace via fair expression!

Here we go, Straight History Month, Gay History Month, Bi-sexual History Month, Transgendered History Month, I can put a condom on a cucumber history month, Timmy has two Dads history month. Maybe if we try just teaching history instead of trying to add orientation we could move forward on the education standings. We our turning our children into a bunch of socially engineered, politically correct idiots. I am hoping this is Governor Jerry "I just arrived on this planet" Brown's idea of a joke.

Those who refuse to recognize this community’s contribution may soon have to bring themselves to stop singing “America, the Beautiful” or enrolling in Continuing Education Programs. Yes, that’s right, the gay community are responsible for those too.

College Students Reflect On 30 Years Of HIV/AIDS

brett — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:48:04 -0500

This story was broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered on 6/3/2011, and was originally published on Turnstyle News..

A lot has changed since the 80’s. Or so I’m told. I wasn’t born until 1991 – the same year Magic Johnson announced that he had HIV. I’m 19 now, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people joke that Magic Johnson discovered the cure to AIDS…money.

Katherine Hood knows the same joke. She’s a senior at UC Berkeley and has grown up knowing about the disease her whole life. Regardless of the jokes, we both know HIV is still deadly serious. “I think it’s interesting because while I don’t think it’s the same sort of death sentence mentality,” says Hood, “To me if I actually stop and think about it, it still seems like a horrifying thought.”

Hood and lots of kids we talked to say their school Sex Ed classes were pretty good. Thanks to my school’s health classes, I had seen a condom by the 7th grade and knew what it was for. My mom even bought me a book called Deal With It. I remember my friends coming over after school to giggle about stick figure illustrations of sexual positions.

Sex and STDs weren’t a mystery for me, but that’s not the experience had by some students, like UC Berkeley senior Tori Partridge. She explains, “I went to this little private Catholic school and our Sex Ed was basically ‘Hey these are the diseases you can get. Don’t have sex.’ So I just sort of went into this world unprepared.”

The benefit of being in my generation is that we can turn to Google for answers. But no amount of research can prepare a person to ask their sexual partner if they’ve been tested. Nicki Ghafari is sitting at a food court in downtown Berkeley with friends. They graduated from a local Catholic high school just last Sunday, and are headed to college this fall. Ghafari knows they’re supposed to ask about their partner’s sexual heath, but the idea still makes her uncomfortable. “If you ask someone, it’s like they’re dirty in a way, like they’re gross,” she says, “personally I feel like whoever you’re with, you should ask.”

At Laney College in downtown Oakland, junior Salvador Lopez has a little more experience with this situation. He says he wasn’t afraid to have the conversation with his sexual partner, “It wasn’t awkward. They just shot the question right back, and I was like ‘I’m good.’ These are questions you still have to ask, no matter how comfortable you are with one another, just to be safe.”

My friend Elizabeth Welsh, a junior at Mills College wants to be safe, but she feels like the talk around prevention never includes her. Welsh is a lesbian who isn’t embarrassed to admit that she has, “a lot of unprotected sex.” She says, “I talk about aids and I’m informed, but at the same time I’m not using a condom in my sex. So what am I going to do? You think about it and the fears there are but how do you get passed that.” Welsh thinks prevention is mainly geared towards straight people and gay men.

No matter who you are, the saddest part about getting tested for HIV today, is that you’re not only worried about your test results, but you’re still terrified about what people might say, as least that the case for me. David Villamarina, a student at Laney College, agrees. “People get made fun of for having an STD or STI. People are judged.”

While treatments have progressed dramatically in the last 30 years, Villamarina says that society is hung up on wrong things. “We will want to be more focused on what we can do to stop it, instead of who has it. It’s not about the people who already got it. The people who already got it, they got it.”

That’s today anyway. My hope is that 30 years from now, people who “got it,” won’t have it forever.

Silence Isn’t Enough

denise — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 16:58:37 -0500

The following originally aired on KQED-FM.

By: Sayre Quevedo

Sitting in class, a friend tapped me on the shoulder and I ignored her, hoping she'd take the time to read the plaque hanging around my neck: Please understand my reason for not speaking today. I am participating in Day of Silence, a national “student protest” against the silence faced by the LGBTQ community and their allies.

About a hundred kids at my school managed to stay silent the whole time while others simply wore the cards in support. I have been a part of Day of Silence for 6 years and while I've stayed true to the nature of the event, a part of me wasn't totally invested.

I barely uttered a word all day, but after school I left to attend a rally in the Mission district where I yelled and chanted for transgender rights. The event was held outside the 16th Street BART station, where weeks earlier, a transgender woman named Mia Tu Mutch, was punched and kicked to the ground.

The climate at the rally was electric. People held signs and chanted, but when I looked around I didn't see any of the kids who had been wearing the plaques at my school.

Out of my own experience, I know that it's not easy to be the one constantly educating and standing up, but if people my age can find solidarity in silence we should also be able to find it in speaking our minds.

Looking back, most of the people who did their first Day of Silence in middle-school were like me, scared into isolation, and looking for some sense of community. But at the end of the day it felt like we hadn't changed anything. The people who bullied continued to bully, the silent stayed silent.

Now that I’m about to graduate high school I find myself wondering what is the point of being silent one whole day if we're also silent the other 364.

Coming Out to Mom

cfoster — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 15:54:30 -0500

This commentary originally aired on WAMU, American University Radio in Washington, D.C.

By Ciara Smith

Most moms dream of one day seeing their baby girl in a beautiful white dress walking down the aisle at her wedding. And most moms dream of the grandchildren who may come later.

Girls are princesses to their moms. So, how do you tell a mother that her princess likes other princesses?

I had my first girlfriend when I was 16, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell my mom that the girl who came over every day to study wasn’t just a friend.

So, for almost three years, I shut myself in the bathroom and practiced “coming out” to my mom in front of the mirror. I’d say things like, ‘Hey mom, you know I love you right…I like girls.’ No, that’s not going to work.

I tried and chickened out twice before I actually told her that I am a lesbian.

There were a lot of reasons why it was so hard for me to come out. I didn’t know how she would react, and I was afraid she might kick me out.

But the biggest reason was that I was afraid of disappointing her. I felt like I’d be breaking her heart.

When I finally told her, her reaction surprised me. She didn’t cry or get upset. She was really calm and told me that as long as I’m happy, she’s happy. I know I am one of the lucky ones. One of my good friends came out to her mom when she was 16… and she got kicked out.

In a way, I understand where moms like hers are coming from. Even though I’m a lesbian, if I had a daughter, I would also dream of her in a beautiful dress getting married to a man and having babies.

I know the pain that comes with being gay. Even with a supportive family, it’s still hard. I’ve lost a lot of friends…friends who believed that being gay is disease or who felt uncomfortable being around me after I came out.

No mother wants to see her child suffer, and I would never want my future daughter to feel the way I did.

But I also know that it’s even more painful to hide your true self. The years I spent pretending to like boys -- pointing out the cute ones and giggling with my friends – were much worse.

And so my dream for my future daughter – and any young girl – more than the beautiful wedding and the handsome husband – is that they find the courage to be themselves.

These commentaries by D.C. area teens are part of a collaboration between WAMU's Youth Voices program, Youth Radio and the Latin American Youth Center.

Hook-Ups Don't Work For Me

Talking to Teens About Sex

Hard Knocks, Good School

Half Way Out

wilmer — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 14:19:03 -0600

The following originally aired on KCBS.

By Sayre Quevedo

I came out to my 5th grade class when I was nine years old and even had a coming out party. But my father’s side of the family doesn’t know I’m gay. Sometimes, they ask me about “girlfriends” I’ve brought along on family camping trips. I just laugh and say “Those girls weren’t my girlfriends.”

It wasn’t that I trusted a group of fifth graders more than half my family, I just cared less how they reacted. Recently, I wrote an editorial about the “It Gets Better Videos” and my experience growing up gay in the Bay Area. I hadn’t seen my father’s family since the article was published and I was dreading Thanksgiving with them.

But when I walked in everyone greeted me normally, barely turning their heads from the football game on TV. I sat down by my uncle, whose reaction I feared most. “I read your article in the paper”, he said. “I only had one problem with it…Why wasn’t I invited to the coming out party?”

I spent so much of my life worrying about this moment and it had ended up being the most anti-climactic coming out ever.

Previously:

Half Way Out

wilmer — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 19:42:59 -0600

The following originally aired on KQED-FM.

By Sayre Quevedo

I came out to my 5th grade class when I was nine years old and even had a coming out party. Sometimes it feels like I’ve been out forever.

But my father’s side of the family doesn’t know I’m gay. Sometimes, they ask me about “girlfriends” I’ve brought along on family camping trips. I just laugh and say “Those girls weren’t my girlfriends,” conveniently leaving out the fact that I’m not attracted to girls.

It wasn’t that I trusted a group of fifth graders more than half my family, I just cared less how they reacted. If my classmates decided they didn’t like me because I was gay, I could always switch schools. But if my father’s family didn’t accept me, I wasn’t sure what I would do. I told my dad I was gay, but never felt comfortable telling his family. They aren’t homophobic but they’re old-fashioned. Being gay just isn’t something you talk about.

Recently, I wrote an editorial about the “It Gets Better Videos” and my experience growing up gay in the Bay Area. I never planned on coming out to my father’s family but the editorial, which ran in the San Francisco Chronicle, ended up doing it for me. I hadn’t seen my father’s family since the article was published and I was dreading Thanksgiving with them.

Pulling up to the house in my dad’s car I already had a speech written out in my head, something beginning with, “You think you can judge me?” I had even gone as far as to think through my dramatic exit if things didn’t go well.

But when I walked in everyone greeted me normally, barely turning their heads from the football game on TV. I sat down by my uncle, whose reaction I feared most. “I read your article in the paper”, he said. “I only had one problem with it…” I braced myself. “Why wasn’t I invited to the coming out party?”

He was trying to break the ice but all I could muster was an awkward, “I don’t know.”

I spent so much of my life worrying about this moment and it had ended up being the most anti-climactic coming out ever.

Previously:

Service Members Support The Repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell

rgee — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 15:46:37 -0600

The Pentagon recently released a study showing new support for getting rid of the policy, "Don't Ask Don't Tell," that currently requires gay and lesbian military service members to keep quiet about their sexuality. The study interviewed 115,000 service members.

The Pentagon summed up their findings in the answers to three questions:

- When asked whether knowing that a fellow unit member was gay or lesbian would affect their unit's ability to get their job done, 70 percent of service members said that it would have no effect or a positive effect.

- When asked if during their career, they had ever worked with someone they believed to be homosexual, 69 percent of service members said yes.

- While serving in a unit with someone they believed to be homosexual, 92 percent of service members said their ability to work together was "very good," "good," or had no positive or negative effect.

The Pentagon also stated that most of the concern about "open" service is driven by misperceptions and stereotypes about what it would mean if gay and lesbian service members were allowed to be open. In addition, they spoke to many gay service members who said they are not trying to push a social agenda or get special treatment, but would like to stop serving in silence.

Youth Radio has been following this issue for over a year. In August 2009, Youth Radio profiled Joseph Rocha, a member of the military who survived extreme harassment from his peers and superiors because of his sexuality. Watch his video below, and visit Youth Radio's hub page for its investigative series Sailors' Abuse Kept Silent in Navy Canine Unit that has won some of journalism's top honors, including an Edward R. Murrow Award.

New Support For Repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell

rgee — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 15:18:55 -0600

The Pentagon recently released a study showing new support for the repeal of the policy, "Don't Ask Don't Tell," that currently requires gay and lesbian service members to keep quiet about their sexuality. The Pentagon summed up their significant findings in the answers to three questions: - When asked whether knowig that an immediate unit member was gay or lesbian would affect their unit's ability to get the job done, 70 percent said that it would have a positive or no effect. - When asked if during their career, they had ever worked with someone they believed to be homosexual, 69 percent said yes. - While serving in a unit with someone they believed to be homosexual, 92 percent of service members said their ability to work together was "very good," "good," or had no positive or negative effect. The Pentagon also stated that most of the concern about "open" service is driven by misperceptions and stereotypes about what it would mean if gay and lesbian service members were allowed to be open. In addition, they spoke to many gay service members who said they are not trying to push a social agenda, or get special treatment, but would like to stop serving in silence. Youth Radio has been following this issue for over a year. In August 2009, Youth Radio profiled Joseph Rocha, a member of the military who survived extreme harassment from his peers and superiors because of his sexuality. Watch his video below, and visit Youth Radio's hub for Navy abuse for more stories.