Greetings, queer skeptics and everyone else who reads our wonderful blog. It has certainly been a crazy couple of days, so here we go.
Janet Mock, on tour for her new memoir, gets tired of being asked who the first person who she came out to as trans* was, so she asks the reporter who the first person she came out as cis to was. It’s an equally valid question, but for some reason it highlights the ridiculousness of the former query.
A lesbian couple who also happened to be Vietnam vets are being denied the ability to be buried next to one another in the Idaho Veteran’s Cemetery, so another vet has written an open letter offering his plot. There are a lot of great pull quotes from the letter and I hope to see the followup, but here is my favorite: “I am happy to give my fellow veteran that small peace of mind. And I do it to honor all the great Americans I’ve served with along the way – gay, straight, whatever.” I think it’s incredible important even for us skeptics to recognize that while there is probably no material benefit after death of being buried next to one another, it does serve to give people peace of mind in life, and that is why is being offered here.
In a bit of sad news, the oldest LGBT bookstore in the country, Giovanni’s Room, is going to be closing its doors after a trend of declining sales. Opened in 1973, this has stood as a monument to the LGBT community in Philadelphia, but like many monuments, it was sorely taken for granted and outpaced by competition. Still, it opened at a time when the very idea of a bookstore dedicated to queer people was madness and the wounds of Stonewall were still pretty wide open.
And finally, Maggie Gallagher responds to Prop. 8 attorney Charles Cooper’s “evolving” view on gay marriage now that his daughter is getting marired to her partner. I admit, I’m mostly posting this out of nostaglia. Maggie was the first anti-gay crusader I became aware of by name, and now that she and her organization are basically husks empty of even a fraction of the influence they used to possess, you just don’t hear from her enough these days. While the trend in anti-gay screeds has been increasingly more shrill games of “I’m Rubber, You’re Glue,” Maggie had a flair about her such that everything she said sounded hilariously confused. Oh well, at least she’s still out there trying to couch her absurd ideas in kind-ish language. I’m going to miss her when she finishes fading into obscurity and I only have Bryan Fischer to yell at.