Tag archive: Sappho

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NFL Player Carl Nassib Comes Out

Just in time for Pride Month, on June 21st Las Vegas Raiders defensive end Carl Nassib became the first active NFL player to come out as homosexual, in a very casual and matter-of-fact Instagram post.  “I just wanted to take a quick moment to say that I’m gay,” stated Nassib, in what sounded almost like an afterthought, a testimony perhaps to the non-event such disclosures have become in recent years.  “I’ve been meaning to do this for a while now, but I finally feel comfortable enough to get it off my chest,” continued Nassib.  “I really have the best life.  I got the best family, friends and job a guy can ask for.  I’m a pretty private person, so I hope you guys know that I’m really not doing this for attention.  I just think that representation and visibility are so important.”

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SCOTUS Cockblocks Conservatives

In a surprise 6-3 decision June 15th, the United States Supreme Court ruled that gays and transgendered individuals are in fact protected by Title VII of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, which already prohibits discrimination in the workplace on sexual grounds.  Conservatives Chief Justice John Roberts and Trump appointee Justice Neil Gorsuch joined the bloc of four liberals in essentially grandfathering in sexual orientation and gender identification to the nearly sixty-year-old law.  Well, duh.

 

The senior Justice in the majority determines who will write the decision, and John Roberts wasted no time in passing this hot potato along to junior Justice Gorsuch, perhaps the unkindest cut of all for conservatives, who have put up with all manner of crudity, ignorance, and anti-Christian-values shenanigans from Donald Trump, all in the name of the justices he would appoint to the Supreme Court, whom they assumed would rule in support of their views.  As historian Jon Meacham recently opined, “they sold their souls to Trump for the Supreme Court, and now find that his check has bounced.”

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Summer of ’69, Part I: The Stonewall Riots

The summer of 1969 was long, hot and volatile, still reverberating with the cosmic gong that was the Uranus/Pluto conjunction of four years previously. In this fiftieth anniversary summer, AAA will be taking a look back at some of the blockbuster events from that period, some of which were obviously momentous at the time, like the Moon Landing, and others which initially seemed to be predominantly personal tragedies, like the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne or the Manson Family murders, but which have reverberated for decades.

 

The summer had barely begun when one of its most consequential events occurred, involving some of what society viewed as its least consequential members. In the wee hours of June 28th, 1969, a group of fed-to-the-teeth drag queens challenged a police raid on a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, essentially inaugurating what became the Gay Rights movement.

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Michael Jackson: Ten Years Later

AAA honors the tenth anniversary of the passing of the “King of Pop” with this reprint of his biography, originally published in the August 2009 Daykeeper Journal. Minor additions and corrections have been made, including an analysis of the recent release of “Leaving Neverland“, a documentary chronicling Jackson’s alleged sexual abuse of children.

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AAA Profile: Mayor Pete

On Palm Sunday 2019 South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg became the first openly gay candidate for the Democratic nomination for US President, in a speech before more than 6,000 supporters. Known affectionately as “Mayor Pete”, Buttigieg had been turning heads with a $7 million haul for his campaign in the first quarter of 2019, even before making his candidacy official. Third place showings in recent polls of Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as several attention-grabbing interviews and speeches, mark him as a potential force to be reckoned with in the Democratic Primary contests.

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AAA Profile: RuPaul

RuPaul is quite possibly the world’s most famous drag queen, an entrepreneurial pioneer who seemed almost single-handedly to have brought drag culture into the American mainstream. An overnight sensation several decades in the making, RuPaul is an accomplished performer, actor and recording artist, host of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”, a drag competition show on VH1, now in its tenth year, which has won three Primetime Emmys. Acknowledged as the most commercially successful drag queen in history, in 2017 RuPaul was included in Time’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

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