@RyanNewYork
He sits on the Broad of Directors of The Ali Forney Center, where he is the founding producer of their annual Broadway Beauty Pageant fundraiser. He's also on the Board of Directors of The Deconstructive Theatre Project and the Board of Advisers of the startup TV Dinner.
He's also a director/producer, who lives in Brooklyn, NY and created the musical White Noise. Ryan writes about politics for The Huffington Post & The Hill. He has been a guest editor for Queerty and is the host of the podcast Gay History: Uncut.
Here Ryan blogs about politics, film, TV, history, religion, science, books, theater, digital media, LGBT issues, Bushwick & Williamsburg, New York City, and anything else he's interested in at the moment. Oh, and he'll probably talk a lot about himself.
This is a personal blog. Any opinions expressed here and on my Twitter represent my own and not those of my employer or clients.
Here’s me on Richard French Live talking about Bill Clinton & DOMA.
I know your email boxes are overflowing today with opportunities to give to your favorite causes and organizations, but still I wanted to share three organizations that I supported in 2012.
Since today’s your last chance at 2012 deductions, don’t miss your chance to give to something important and take from the IRS at the same time. Even a $5 gift helps make the work these organizations do possible.
Tithing shouldn’t just be a religious concept.
- The Ali Forney Center: One of my favorite organizations out there, AFC works directly with LGBT homeless youth in New York City. There are 1,800 homeless LGBT youth each night on the streets of NYC and AFC spends each dollar they receive on comprehensive programs that really help.
- The Deconstructive Theatre Project: An innovative young theatre company that produces work and provides community education projects in Brooklyn.
- All Out: An international LGBT watchdog organization that keeps an eye on vital gay and human rights issues from Uganda to Russia. They were also the parent organization of the 2012 marriage equality effort The Four 2012 that I co-founded.
Of course, at Blue State Digital I’m lucky enough to work with dozens and dozens of amazing organizations that deserve support including The NAACP and Freedom To Marry.
Thanks and have a lovely New Year.
Great article on Buzzfeed about the brand new video that Lady Gaga just released for The Four 2012. You can just skip to the video here.
The second video of The Four’s four-part series focuses on real gay couples in the state of Minnesota. It’s lovely, please share.
From Minnesota, this is the second of a four-part series, co-produced by New Left Media and The Four, made in each of the states that have marriage equality votes this November. Part one, from Maine, can be viewed here.
Marriage For All Families captures the real experience of same-sex couples, to show that they have the same challenges, responsibilities, and aspirations as other couples. Still, they are strangers in the eyes of the law. That’s why marriage equality is so important: it aligns personality reality with legal reality, as a simple matter of fairness and equality.
Part three will be released Tuesday, October 16th on TheFour.com.
Money doesn’t decide elections, but it plays a huge part. We’ve lost 32 state LGBT ballot initiatives and we’ve been outspent in the majority of those fights. We’re not going to let that happen this year. Donate today to the four states.
http://www.thefour2012.com/moneybomb
Moneybomb For Marriage: Support Marriage Equality in Four Key States
It’s started. America’s biggest anti-gay organization has written a check for a quarter of a million dollars to take out marriage equality in Washington State. This won’t be the last check they write either, and the next ones will probably be bigger, and in more states.
So we’re fighting back. This November, there are four states with marriage on the ballot and we have a chance to win them all, if there is enough money to match our opposition dollar for dollar. To make it simple, we’ve created a way for you to donate to the pro-equality groups in all four states - Maine, Maryland, Minnesota and Washington - all at once. However much you like — split any way you like.
We are 40 days out from Election Day - and every dollar counts. Will you make a contribution to any or all of the four states and make marriage happen? Thanks for helping.
One problem with ballot initiatives is that sometimes the language can confuse the voter. We’ve put together this graphic to let voters know how to support marriage equality in their state.
Please share and visit us at The Four 2012 for daily content until election day.
(via thefour2012)
Some beautiful pictures from Uganda where gay pride activities are still a form of political resistance. Bravo to these courageous people.
After months of preparation, and despite arrests, Uganda’s gay community concluded all its planned Pride events, including a beach parade, parties and a film festival. All were well attended by a courageous LGBTI community, considering that Uganda is a country that criminalizes homosexual sex acts and seeks legislation to kill its gays for “aggravated homosexuality” with long prison terms for so-called “promotion of homosexuality.”
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The importance of this Pride event cannot be understated. The fact that these brave activists could pull this off in this milieu of persecution is a great victory for the community. Visibility like this notes the ongoing legacy of late activist David Kato, it defies the export of American Evangelical hate, and it helps ensure defeat of the Bahati Bill. It shows leadership for all of Africa, and above all it shows that the LGBT people of Uganda simply refuse to give up their right to exist and to live their natural born sexual orientation.
For the rest of the story and more pictures, visit The Advocate.
Something that I’m working on. Signup to learn more.
A remarkably beautiful story of a lesbian couple, one who serves in the military, told via a familiar social network. Kudos to Freedom To Marry and all involved in producing this, it’s powerful and deserves an audience.
To learn what you can do to help repeal DOMA, click here.
I’ve always thought it was something that was still holding the country back. What people do in their own homes is their business and you can choose to love whoever you love. That’s their business. It’s no different than discriminating against blacks. It’s discrimination plain and simple… I think it’s the right thing to do, so whether it costs him votes or not – again, it’s not about votes. It’s about people.
It’s the right thing to do as a human being.
Jay Z, endorsing marriage equality.
Watch the video here.
A great timeline of progress made for the gay community under Barack Obama. Click for a closer look.
Fascinating piece by Frank Rich on the anti-gay hysteria of the 80s and 90s, well worth a read.
rtnt:
Airbrushing the History of Liberal Politics and Gay Rights
Guest submission from nineinchnihils.
For New York Magazine, Frank Rich examines the uncomfortable and rarely-spoken-of fact that many national, liberal leaders who now fervently support gay rights only moved to do so when it was politically safe (or beneficial) and that many of those same leaders have track records at direct odds with the equality movement.
The second thing that’s wrong with the picture is far less obvious because it has been willfully obscured. In the outpouring of provincial self-congratulation that greeted the legalization of same-sex marriage in New York, some of the discomforting history that preceded that joyous day has been rewritten, whitewashed, or tossed into a memory hole. We—and by we, I mean liberal New Yorkers like me, whether straight or gay, and their fellow travelers throughout America—would like to believe that the sole obstacles to gay civil rights have been the usual suspects: hidebound religious leaders both white and black, conservative politicians (mostly Republican), fundamentalist Christian and Muslim zealots, and unreconstructed bigots. What’s been lost in this morality play is the role that many liberal politicians and institutions have also played in slowing and at some junctures halting gay civil rights in recent decades.
It was, after all, the trustees of the Smithsonian Institution, not a Bible Belt cultural outpost, who bowed to pressure from the militant Catholic League just fifteen months ago to censor the work of a gay American artist who had already been silenced, long ago, by AIDS. It was a Democratic president, with wide support from Democrats on Capitol Hill, who in 1996 signed the Defense of Marriage Act, one of the most discriminatory laws ever to come out of Washington. It’s precisely because of DOMA that to this day same-sex marriages cannot be more than what you might call placebo marriages in the eight states (plus the District of Columbia) that have legalized them. DOMA denies wedded same-sex couples all federal benefits—some 1,000, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veterans’ programs—and allows the other 42 states to ignore their marriages altogether.
You can be fired in 29 states for being gay. Learn more at GLAAD and stand up for Ellen.
