Cleve Jones in Houston
Gay rights pioneer and founder of the AIDS memorial quilt Cleve Jones, will be in town Sunday–Monday, May 21–22, to promote his new autobiography Stitching a Revolution: The Making of an Activist. The book is a great read for those of us who have struggled with the movement from the beginning. But it’s equally informative for those who want to learn how far we’ve come.

After confronting his parents with his sexual orientation, Cleve fled to San Francisco in 1972, only 17 years old. Eventually he became friends with, and political apprentice to, openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk. Harvey’s tragic assassination in 1978 and its aftermath really focused Cleve’s activism.
But the defining event of Cleve’s life has certainly been the AIDS epidemic. A simple idea to remember friends has turned into an international symbol of triumph over grief and love over prejudice. His own HIV diagnosis and illness has not dampened his spirit. In a phone conversation, his zest for life and commitment to the cause of global AIDS awareness was evident. He had just returned from a presentation of the quilt in South Africa, and a visit with Nelson Mandela. He wants Houstonians to know how grateful he is for their enormous dedication to his life’s work. He says that, next to San Francisco, Houston was the first city to embrace the quilt. —Craig Thistleton

Cleve Jones will be signing his book and speaking Sunday, May 21, 4–6 p.m. at Crossroads Market, 1111 Westheimer, and Monday, May 22, 6:30 p.m. at Bookstop, 2922 S. Shepherd. On Monday, first come see Cleve at Bookstop, and then come see the The Times of Harvey Milk, 7:30 p.m., at the Glassell School (across from the Museum of Fine Arts), where, after the film, Cleve will be part of a panel discussion talking about Harvey. There will also be a cocktail party fundraiser and reception with Cleve on Sunday evening benefitting Houston NAMES Project. (Call 281/493-4639 for more info; tickets are $100.)

HIV Clout
Would you like to have a voice in advocating for funding and services for people living with HIV and AIDS? The People With AIDS Coalition-Houston announces the start of Project L.E.A.P., an intensive training program for HIV-positive individuals and others who want to become advocates for HIV/AIDS-related services and funding. This 100-hour, six-month program will give participants all of the knowledge necessary to serve on committees and councils that prioritize and allocate money for HIV/AIDS, such as the Ryan White Planning Council. To learn more, call project coordinator Rich Arenschieldt at 713/522-5428, ext. 28.

Night in Black Leather
The Night in Black Leather (NIBL) at the Venture-N, March 24–25, raised an incredible $15,300 for the Body Positive Wellness Center. Featuring Dr. Tony Mills, the event was produced by Don Gill Productions. “We are very happy to have exceeded our expectations to raise these funds for Body Positive,” said Don Gill, organizer of the event. “In the past six years, NIBL has raised $56,000 for six HIV nonprofit organizations. Don Gill Productions itself has raised close to $500,000 in the past seven years for HIV and gay and lesbian causes. I feel very happy and proud that we have made a difference,” added Gill. Don Gill’s next project will be to raise money to build a CareGivers’ Wall in a Montrose park to celebrate the lives of those who have cared for those who had died and survived HIV.

Texas high court asked to reconsider transsexual case
AUSTIN—The Texas state Supreme Court has refused to review a state appeals court ruling that rejected the rights of the transsexual widow of a man to sue his doctors for medical negligence in his death. In October, a Texas state appeals court ruled that Christie Lee Littleton, 47, is legally male, and as such could not have legally married Jonathan Littleton and had no rights as his widow.

The appeals court based its ruling on the presumption that Christie Littleton remained a “chromosomal male” in spite of a sex-change operation and hormone therapy. Houston transgender rights activist Phyllis Frye is Littleton’s attorney. Frye is currently in the process of asking the state supreme court to reconsider its refusal; she says the court ignored reality.

“The State of Texas provided the facilities, the physicians, and some of the funding for Mrs. Littleton’s surgery,” says Frye, “gave her a State Identification Card saying ‘female,’ and the Internal Revenue Service accepted hers and her husband’s annual Form 1040s as ‘married filing jointly’ for seven years.”

Biologists for years have realized that not all females have an XX chromosome structure and not all males have XY chromosomes. Some geneticists estimated that as many as 1 in 400 people don’t conform to the usual XX or XY chromosomal pattern. The best known instance was Eva Klobukowska of Poland who was eliminated from European Cup competition because a chromosome test indicated her structure was XXY and she was declared to have been male. Several years later Klobukowska got her revenge when she became pregnant and had a child.

Frye wants the state’s high court to reconsider its refusal to review the appeals court ruling because, among other things, Littleton was never tested to determine genetic status. The court, Frye says, just assumes she was male because she once had male sexual organs.

Complicating the case further, Texas law bars state officials—including courts—from using genetic information, so even if the court had wanted to test Littleton’s chromosomes, it couldn’t. In addition, Frye says, other state’s courts have issued a variety of rulings concerning the legal status of married transsexuals that the appeals court did not take into account.

The civil unions bill won Senate approval by a vote of 19-11, with 11 Republicans opposing it and 17 Democrats joined by two Republicans who voted in favor of the measure. Foes of the civil unions bill wanted the state’s constitution amended to make sure the civil unions law isn’t expanded in the future to legalizing marriages for gays and lesbians.

The civil unions measure was almost identical to a measure already approved by the state House of Representatives earlier in March by a much closer vote of 76-69. The main difference between the Senate and House bills is simply the date the law would take effect. The Senate measure set July 1 while the House picked September 1 for the law to go into effect. But because of the fairly minor difference, the measure must now go back to the House for another vote, and that has raised some concerns that some lawmakers who had supported the bill earlier might now change their votes.

Gov. Howard Dean has supported the bill since the state Supreme Court ruling and has already said he would sign the measure when it reaches his desk.
The measure gives same-sex couples who enter into civil unions sweeping rights and responsibilities, including making medical decisions for one another, state tax breaks, and inheritance rights.

NOW’s Elizabeth Toledo to lead NGLTF
WASHINGTON, D.C.—The National Gay & Lesbian Task Force has named Elizabeth Toledo to take over as its executive director beginning June 1.
Toledo served until recently as the National Organization for Women’s vice president for action, a post concerned mainly with grassroots organizing for the country’s leading feminist group. In a press statement, Toledo said, “NGLTF is the recognized leader in grassroots political activity in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender movement. I bring to NGLTF a commitment to grassroots training, organizing, and mobilization. One of my primary goals at NGLTF will be to strengthen GLBT infrastructure in all 50 states and on the national level.”
Toledo replaces Kerry Lobel, NGLTF’s outgoing director.

Although a number of openly gay and lesbian artists have won Pulitzers in literary and music categories, Schoofs is the first openly gay journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize as an individual in the journalism category.

Delegates at the conference will also be joined by some notable figures. On May 10, the Most Rev. George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury, is slated to address the gathering—the first time the head of the Anglican Church has ever done so.

Outside the conference itself, however, will be another noted figure, protesting the Methodist and Anglican church policies restricting the role of gays and lesbians in their congregations: Arun Gandhi, grandson of Indian spiritual and civil rights leader Mahanas K. “Mahatma” Gandhi. Gandhi will be part of a protest at the United Methodist conference being organized by Soulforce, the religious group that works for equality for gays and lesbians in churches.

In a press statement, Dr. Mel White, co-founder of the organization, said, “We are using this civil disobedience and mass arrest to deliver a clear message to leaders of all the Christian churches. This tragic debate about God’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered children must end. The suffering has gone on far too long.”

Also joining the protest will be the Rev. Dr. James Lawson, a United Methodist pastor who worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King to organize lunch counter sit-ins in the South, and the Rev. Dr. Robert Graetz, a Lutheran pastor whose home was bombed because he supported King’s bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., in the 1950s.

The Roman Catholic Church has been strong-arming Rome officials for months in an effort to get the city to cancel permits for World Pride 2000, which is expected to draw up to a half-million gays and lesbians from throughout Europe. Vatican officials say the event is an offense to the church which is celebrating the year 2000 as a jubilee marking the birth of Jesus Christ (even though historians generally agree Christ was probably born in the year 3 or 4 B.C.).

Now Vatican officials say organizers of the World Pride festival have received a letter from Gore, who is expected to be the Democratic nominee for president this year, saying he is “pleased to send greetings” and that Italian gay rights groups organizing the event are “building a good and just society on the bedrock principle of opportunity.”

John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron in Ohio, who conducted the NAE survey, said evangelicals were “coming to terms with what it means to live in a diverse, pluralistic society. There is a sense that one can have one’s own views about morality without needing to force them on other people.”

The distraught letters, from Garbo to de Acosta, who was a lesbian, were unsealed after 30 years of being kept under wraps and reveal that she was first romanced and then apparently hounded by de Acosta. De Acosta was known to have had affairs with Marlene Dietrich and Isadora Duncan and once claimed there wasn’t a woman in Hollywood she could not seduce.

De Acosta, who died in 1968, donated the letters to the museum with instructions they were not to be revealed for 30 years after Garbo’s death. The actress died in 1970.

Although Garbo’s family has insisted the star was not a lesbian, the Garbo letters clearly suggest that she was deeply smitten with de Acosta and was devastated when the woman spurned her in order to have an affair with Dietrich. But in the mid-1940s Garbo became concerned by what had become de Acosta’s fanatical attentions. At one point the actress asked her brother to protect her from de Acosta.

The city’s Equal Opportunities Commission unanimously recommended the bias ban, covering employment, housing, and public accommodation, and it has now been introduced by Alderman Mike Verveer in the city’s governing Common Council. The paper reported that the proposed measure is “expected to easily pass” and that Mayor Sue Bauman will probably support it as well. “Like gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, transgendered persons also face discrimination,” Verveer told the paper. “But unlike lesbians, gays, and bisexuals, transgendered people are much more likely to fall victim to discrimination.”

Mutual of Omaha ends AIDS coverage caps
OMAHA, Neb.—Insurance giant Mutual of Omaha has ended its caps on HIV and AIDS illnesses after successfully fighting to the U.S. Supreme Court lawsuits aimed at ending the coverage limits. Two Chicago policyholders had sued Mutual of Omaha, which limited some coverage for HIV/AIDS illnesses to only $25,000 per year, although the firm covers most other health conditions up to $1 million. The insurance company said only that the firm revised its cap policy for HIV/AIDS after it learned more about medical coverage of the illness.

Danzig, head of the Navy since 1998, said the issue is mainly a social rather than military one, insisting that once society reaches a consensus, the issue will be easily resolved by the armed forces. “The military isn’t the testing ground for a variety of propositions about social issues,” Danzig said. “Eventually, it [the role of gays in the military] will be appropriately resolved by Congress. It is really much more an issue for society at large.”

Bush, who had vacillated about meeting gay and lesbian Republicans during his election bid, said the meeting had made him “a better person” and that he welcomed “gay Americans into my campaign.” The Texas governor also said during a press conference after the meeting that sexual orientation would not be a factor in making appointments if he wins the election this November. “It’s not a factor,” Bush said. “What’s important is, can the person do the job and do we share a philosophy.”

Afterward the group issued a cautious, carefully worded press release commending Bush for going ahead with the meeting. “Today’s meeting was a positive first step in an historic dialogue with a Republican presidential nominee, in an election cycle that has been truly historic for gay Americans,” said Robert Stears, chairman of Log Cabin Republicans. “We commend Governor Bush for the positive dialogue he has begun this week with gay Americans, and we all are encouraged by the fact that this is the first of many opportunities to discuss policy issues and concerns which we share with him.”

Some ill-will over the snub to the national group, however, apparently remains. David Hanson, who heads the coalition of Log Cabin clubs in California, turned down an invitation to the meeting saying in a letter to Bush that it was “inappropriate for your campaign to choose our national leaders.” Jim Driscoll, an AIDS policy adviser with Log Cabin, also described the meeting as “kind of Log Cabin versus Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

Among those who met with Bush were Dan Stewart, the openly gay mayor of Plattsburgh, N.Y.; former U.S. Rep. Steve Gunderson of Wisconsin; David Catania, a member of the District of Columbia Council; Carl Schmid, an alternative GOP delegate; David Greer, head of the Pennsylvania Log Cabin Republicans; and Rebecca Maestri of the group’s Northern Virginia group.

Ironically, the day before the scheduled meeting, Susan Weddington, head of the Texas GOP, said the state’s Log Cabin clubs would again not be allowed to attend the party’s state convention this year. Weddington told the Houston Chronicle that excluding the Texas gay group from the convention was a “business decision” because of limited space and because the state party has a new rule barring any group space that had filed a lawsuit to be in its 1998 convention—a rule that even Weddington acknowledged was aimed specifically to keep Log Cabin out.

“At puberty, boys start taking a strong interest in sex,” Helmer writes. “In the great majority of cases this interest will focus on girls, as the duckling focuses on its mother. In a few cases the natural inclination becomes focused on the wrong gender.”

Helmer says society should therefore actively discriminate against gays and lesbians. “If we give adolescent youngsters the wrong signal at a key period of their lives, if we glamorize homosexuals in the media, if we fail to discriminate, we risk the likelihood they will fixate on the wrong gender. We risk denying them the chance of a normal life.”

British Labor Party MP John Healey said of Helmer’s ideas: “It is far right, far out, and frightening that this sort of man is an elected representative of today’s Tory Party.”

Mississippi senate OKs adoption ban
JACKSON, Miss.—Following quickly the lead of the state’s House of Representatives, the Mississippi state Senate unanimously approved a bill that would bar same-sex couples from adopting children in the state and sent it to Gov. Ronnie Musgrove, who has already indicated he will sign the bill into law. A similar bill earlier this legislative session died in committee but was quickly revived after the American Family Association launched a telephone campaign of state lawmakers urging them to restore the measure.

Florida has a similar ban, and Utah’s legislature earlier this year approved a measure barring gays and lesbians from adopting children as well.
The Mississippi chapter of the ACLU says it may file suit on behalf of a gay couple who were already waiting to adopt a child when the law was approved. If it is signed into law as expected and the couple cannot adopt, the public interest law group said it will sue the state for the couple.

A proposal to extend similar benefits at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., also won overwhelming support from the faculty senate and now goes to the university trustees for approval.

In the nation’s heartland, the academic senate at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln also approved a recommendation to extending the same benefits married faculty and staff spouses now have to the domestic partners of same-sex couples. The Nebraska recommendation faces an uphill battle, according to the school’s chancellor, James Moeser, who said talks with some of the university’s regents “are not prepared to make this change.”

The faculty senate at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, also adopted a resolution calling on the school to extend benefits to the domestic partners of faculty and staff at the university.

More than a hundred colleges and university in the U.S. already offer partner benefits programs to faculty and staff members.

“If Rich was a homosexual, then I’m a nun,” said Burton’s brother Graham Jenkins.

The controversial claims are included in author Ellis Amburn’s unauthorized Taylor bio, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, slated to be published in May. In the book, Amburn claims Burton had an affair with Sir Laurence Olivier and also tried to seduce Eddie Fisher, Taylor’s husband when the two actors met for the filming of Cleopatra.

Canadian lawmakers OK national partners measure
OTTAWA—Fending off more than a hundred attempts to amend a national domestic partnership measure, Canada’s House of Commons approved the measure and sent it on to the national Senate, where it is expected to win approval as well.

Most of the amendment attempts were aimed at trying to weave throughout the bill definitions of marriage to exclude any possibility gays and lesbians might some day win marriage rights in Canada. The measure already includes a traditional definition of marriage in its preamble, but opponents wanted various definitions worked in throughout the bill. The measure would change more than 60 Canadian statutes and affect some 20 government departments, giving same-sex couples bankruptcy protections, survivors’ benefits, tax credits, and other legal benefits now limited to common law or legally married opposite-sex couples.

The government proposed the controversial bill following a Supreme Court decision last year that struck down Ontario’s definition of “spouse” because it discriminated by excluding same-sex couples.

Police say they rescued Muna Hawatmeh after the young woman’s lover reported the woman was being forcibly taken from Salt Lake City by the family. The family has denied any wrongdoing and said they were only trying to take the young woman to visit a sister in San Francisco.

The grant will be paid out to Stonewall over the next three years for a non-lobbying project known as Citizenship 21 that is aimed at reducing homophobia, encouraging changes in institutions, and building working relationships with other minority communities in the UK. The program came about following a series of bombings a year ago that terrorized black, Asian, and gay communities in London—including the bombing of a gay bar that left several people dead and severely injured dozens of others. Authorities say the man charged in that string of bomb attacks targeted racial minorities and homosexuals because he saw those groups as “subhuman.”

Idaho lawmakers threaten state PBS network
BOISE, Id.—A broadly worded measure approved by the Idaho Legislature earlier this year restricting the types of programming the Idaho Public Television (IPTV) network can run could land the state in court and cost the network its federal funding. The controversial bill still has not been signed into law because of questions about its ramifications.

Prompted by the Idaho chapter of the Christian Coalition, state lawmakers added restrictions in this year’s state public television budget barring any program that “promotes, supports, or encourages the violation of Idaho criminal statutes.” The legislators were mainly angry because IPTV aired It’s Elementary, a documentary about how schools can deal with children who are being reared by gay or lesbian couples. The lawmakers also objected to a broadcast film version of the novel Madame Bovary because it portrays adultery, and an art program that featured an Edgar Manet painting of a nude woman.

The Idaho chapter of the ACLU said it may have “no alternative” but to sue the state for First Amendment and free speech violations if the law goes into effect.

“I don’t think any legislature in the nation has imposed restrictions on the content of what public broadcasting stations can air,” said Jack Van Valkenburgh, head of the state’s ACLU. “It sets a scary tone.”

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has also said it is reviewing the pending measure to determine whether the agency could fund IPTV under the terms of the bill. CPB funding accounts for about 17 percent of IPTV’s annual budget. Gov. Dirk Kempthorne’s office says he has not yet decided whether to sign the measure or not.

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