YES, DADDY by Jonathan Parks-Ramage (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 288 pp., $25)
“Yes, Daddy.” the Hamptons-based debut novel by Jonathan Parks-Ramage, may leave you queasy for all the wrong reasons.
A gothic thriller set primarily on a “[Richard] Serra-esque” Southampton compound, “Yes, Daddy” moves apace, is smartly written and undeniably amusing. The problem is not with its artistry, but with its intention — the fiction is pulp, not serious literature. It’s genre, which is fine, but because it deals with such hot-button issues as gang rape, indentured servitude, homophobia, conversion therapy, religious fanaticism and false allegations of child molestation, the whole endeavor feels sensationalistic and very nearly exploitative.
As is the current trend to take sensitive topics and turn them into titillating diversions, “Yes, Daddy” finds itself at home with other recent “content” of its type, including Jordan Peele’s “Get Out,” Emerald Fennell’s “Promising Young Woman” and anything produced by Ryan Murphy. It’s hardly a surprise that “Yes, Daddy” has already been bought by Amazon Studios and will soon be a movie. The structure, tone, pacing and language all feel TV-movie ready. It goes down quickly, does a disservice to its subjects and is soon forgotten. Sadly, this is the fate of most contemporary novels with their derivative MFA-workshop formulas.
The story centers on young Jonah Keller, an aspiring gay playwright from Illinois, whose Christian zealot parents do irreparable damage to him. He flees to New York City where he secures a job as a waiter in a swank, though sleazy, restaurant frequented by handsy older gay men of means. Jonah’s desperate financial state — he sublets a crummy apartment in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn from the lead singer of an underground rock band and begs his mother for rent money every month — impels him to pursue accomplished playwright and screenwriter Richard Shriver, who whisks him away to his stately compound in Sagaponack. The very rich Richard apparently owns so much property, he had four additional houses built on his land for his closest friends, an assortment of lecherous, shallow, debased, narcissistic high-society stereotypes. Jonah, as well as a waitstaff of bruised but beautiful boys, are trapped on the grounds, hemmed in by an outsized iron fence. Jonah soon learns that this fantastical existence will cost him much more than he can afford to pay.
“Yes, Daddy” has its surprises, which I won’t ruin. Many of Richard’s cohorts — and cartoonishly gargoyle mother — quickly reveal themselves to be monsters to varying degrees. They are all deeply wounded, cynical people — stupendously successful designers, artists, filmmakers and actors who are so bored with their dreamlike lives they find stimulation only in abuse and cruelty.
There is an interesting psychological study buried somewhere in here, one that would have made for a deeper and more complex book. What is it about absolute power that corrupts absolutely? Do those who have the most gifts, privilege and access turn barbaric because of their good fortunes or have they achieved their wealth and ascension because they began as venal sociopaths? These are questions a more thoughtful story would have attempted to probe, if not answer. Novelists shouldn’t answer questions, anyway, but only pose them. It’s also a lazy, tired trope to always portray the wealthy as outrightly evil, as if exponents of the underclass are incapable of heinous deeds.
Jonah, much like all the characters that inhabit the novel, is spoiled and ungrateful. He’s a predatory social climber obsessed with status and money who takes advantage of his mother’s financial generosity. Parks-Ramage clearly knows this world well, one of conspicuous consumption, prohibitive fashion labels, tony restaurants, rarified art forums, celebrity culture, and all the vapid, superficial markings of New York’s gay social scene. The story also offers knowing insights into the pointed snobbery of New York’s literati and the intellect-numbing drone of big media like TMZ, Buzzfeed and Vice .
Parks-Ramage also accurately captures Southampton life — all the pretenses, pedigrees and preening. The mansions along the beach. Manors nestled within lush gardens. The Hamptons Jitney. Jobs Lane shopping. Exclusive parties.
If only he’d dedicated as much energy and care developing the moral ambiguities of his story.
PEORIA – Gay and transgendered people have made great contributions to society throughout history, but their stories are rarely told.
That will change this fall when teachers at Peoria Public Schools start using curriculum created by The Legacy Project, a Chicago-based non-profit dedicated to researching and promoting the contributions lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people have made to world history and culture.
Students will have the opportunity to learn about Albert D.J. Cashier, who was named Jennie Hodgers at birth. He emigrated to the US from Ireland as a teenager and enlisted in the 95th Illinois Infantry in 1862 and fought in about 40 battles in the Civil War. They could also learn about the author of “America the Beautiful,” a Wellesley College English teacher named Katharine Lee Bates who had a 25-year relationship with another professor, a woman. And they will also have the opportunity to learn about George Washington Carver, an agricultural scientist and inventor who developed hundreds of products from peanuts, sweet potatoes and soybeans. Carver’s life partner was a man, a fellow researcher.
Stories like these not only provide a much richer look at history than has traditionally been provided, they will also help children struggling with their identities see that there are many paths they can choose, and that they are all OK, said Deric Kimler, executive director of Central Illinois Friends.
“We are trying to make healthier options, where it’s OK that I’m gay — I don’t know if I am, but it’s OK to have these thoughts right now. And it’s OK to be straight, and to understand my friend is gay and I don’t have to be gay just to be cool, I don’t need to go down that path with my friend,” said Kimler, who is on the committee developing the curriculum at Peoria Public Schools.
LGBTQ curriculum in grades K-12 was mandated when Gov. JB Pritzker signed HB 246 into law in 2019. Illinois is only the third state to mandate that public schools teach LGBTQ history, following California and New Jersey. While private schools are not bound by state mandates, public schools are, said Beth Crider, superintendent of the Peoria Regional Office of Education. Meeting the mandate will not require the purchase of a new textbook or the creation of a new course, however.
“Most districts will weave this information into already standing courses,” Crider said.
There were many good reasons for mandating LGBTQ education, Becca Mathis said when she and Kimler gave a presentation about the new curriculum during a PPS school board meeting May 10.
The statistics are startling: LGBTQ students are 33% more likely to be bullied and 35% more likely to be physically assaulted, 63% more likely to feel sad or hopeless, and 48% more likely to have seriously considered suicide than non-LGBTQ students.
“There is a lot of data that shows children in these communities experience very significant health disparities in all regions related to health, no just related to social emotional health, but also physical health,” Mathis told the board. “The goal of implementing more inclusive curriculum is to make sure that students feel they are learning in a very safe environment, and they also feel like they are connected and a part of their schools.”
As a preliminary step to introducing the curriculum, teachers and school staff are currently receiving Safe Zone Training, Kimler said.
“It’s training for LGBTQ language and how to handle adolescents who are LGBTQ, different situations and what to say, what not to say, how to help when someone is coming out, and what that means,” Kimler said.
Teachers and district staff are also being given resources to help them deal with situations as they arise.
“Central Illinois Friends, Hult Center for Healthy Living, and Peoria Proud will be available for staff to refer those hard cases out. It could be bullying, it could be internal identity, a friend’s identity, it could be parental identity, or it could be a son or daughters’ identity,” Kimler said.
Meetings are happening now between committee members and principals, a first step toward getting teachers trained in implementing the curriculum.
“It’s really important for these principals to have buy-in, because they are the ones who are going to hear it from the teacher, because the teachers are going to hear it from the parents,” Kimler said.
So far complaints from parents and teachers have been minimal, she said. Many who have spoken up simply needed more information.
“It’s not something that’s going to be tested on, there’s no teeth in this where teachers are being forced to do it. It’s just a tool that parents, children and staff members and educators will be able to utilize with the hopes that, if one kid is having a horrible time trying to figure out who they are, one parent or teacher or student doesn’t say something that leads them to take their own lives,” Kimler said.
History lessons about LGBTQ individuals will happen in middle and high schools. The focus in K-12 will be on using inclusive language, she said.
“It is hard for adults to understand the concept of what questions kids have, but you may be surprised just how easy it is when you are talking about daddies and daddies – and that’s OK – or mommies and mommies – and that’s OK. And that not everyone is like you, and that’s OK, and we celebrate everyone differently and uniquely. So it’s as simple as that. It’s LGBTQ books that don’t put a binary construction on an individual, so having a Tom, but referring to them as they. Little introductions like that is where we start in the elementary. It’s not saying ‘George Washington Carver created multiple ways to use a peanut, and oh, by the way, he was gay.’ That’s not the conversation we are having in first grade,” said Kimler.
The implementation of LGBTQ curriculum is a personal mission for Kimler, who grew up in Williamsfield and graduated with a class of 23 kids in 2007. He’d always been told he would have a girlfriend when he grew up, and was completely unprepared when he started having feelings for other boys in junior high school.
“I couldn’t pay attention in school, I was getting in trouble all the time, and I honestly think that if I had had representation, I wouldn’t have had that struggle,” said Kimler. “My struggles were based on the fact that I hated myself, and I hated going to school, this world wasn’t for me and I tried to take my life multiple times. I wouldn’t have had to go through that if I’d just known — even though I didn’t know in junior high if I was gay or not — that it was OK if I was.”
Leslie Renken can be reached at 270-8503 or lrenken@pjstar.com. Follow her on Facebook.com/leslie.renken.
With COVID rates dropping and vaccinations on the rise, the United States and other places are removing some requirements for face coverings. Are they moving too fast?
Lynne Peeples
Lynne Peeples is a science journalist in Seattle, Washington.
A mural promotes mask use while honouring health workers in Mexico City. Credit: Pedro Padro/AFP via Getty
A sign is still posted on the front door of the Wolfeboro Food Co-op that reads, “Face masks required.” Until recently, another sign had hung directly below it, explaining how the New Hampshire market was following federal policy.
Erin Perkins, manager of the shop, removed that second sign on 14 May — the day after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that fully vaccinated individuals, in most situations, no longer need to wear a mask. “We weren’t expecting that,” says Perkins. “It puts us in a precarious position. We were not about to start asking people if they are vaccinated or not.”
New Hampshire was the last state in New England to start mandating mask wearing in public to reduce the spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. And on 16 April, it became the first in the region to lift that mandate, joining several other states around the country that were loosening their pandemic-related restrictions. Cities and businesses in New Hampshire could still set their own policies, and Perkins wasn’t comfortable changing things right away. Even after the CDC announced its latest guidelines — just two weeks after communicating that vaccinated people should continue to mask up indoors — Perkins wasn’t personally comfortable with unmasked people in her shop. She also knows that several customers have immune systems that are compromised, and emerging research suggests that people in this group are still at risk even after vaccination1.
“Until we feel better about the state of things — until the numbers make a little bit more sense to us, we have decided to wait,” she says, even if that means dealing with testy customers.
Anne Hoen, an epidemiologist at Dartmouth College in nearby Hanover, can understand Perkins’s caution. She says that both the state and federal moves were probably a little too early. Hoen works in New Hampshire but lives just across the border in Vermont, where a state-wide indoor mask mandate remained in force until mid-May, despite Vermont having a lower rate of hospitalizations than practically anywhere else in the country. In the wake of the CDC’s announcement, Vermont Governor Phil Scott relaxed the mandate for fully vaccinated individuals.
The weakening policies are out of step with those of many other countries. Germany strengthened its mask requirements at the end of April, for example. It was facing a slowdown in vaccination rates and a surge in cases. Spain tightened its requirements at the end of March.
The evidence is clear that masks cut down on COVID-19 deaths, but nearly a year and a half into the pandemic and with vaccination coverage climbing in many places, public-health scientists and officials are still struggling to get people — particularly unvaccinated people — to wear masks at appropriate times. Average mask use across the United States has been declining since mid-February. Meanwhile, infection rates in some places have increased. A patchwork of policies and mixed messages from both politicians and public-health officials has resulted in confusion, consternation and a mess of data to interpret. “We’re all over the map,” says Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco. “That’s been the problem this entire pandemic. We’ve been making it up as we go along.”
It wasn’t until late April, for example, that the US government finally distinguished between indoor and outdoor mask use in its recommendations, even though the science had been clear for months that the risk of transmission was much lower outdoors2. And now, after the CDC released its latest revision, agency director Rochelle Walensky noted that it could change its mask guidance yet again. Hoen and other epidemiologists warn that it is very difficult to reinstate a rule after it has been revoked.
Mask use will continue for this pandemic, and it’s likely to become a common response to future outbreaks. So researchers are trying to get a handle on what the science says about how to encourage people to wear them. As the COVID-19 pandemic enters a new phase, scientists around the world are accessing the accumulated data and asking what makes some policies more effective than others, and probing when and how they need to change.
Gandhi is among those who emphasize that mask messaging should evolve in light of rising vaccination rates. Officials should begin relaxing restrictions to give people hope and to motivate vaccination, she says. But changes need to be made carefully.
Around the same time that New Hampshire rescinded its rule, for example, COVID-19 cases in India began to surge. Strict mask mandates there had reined in the country’s first wave of infections last September. But as COVID-19 numbers came under control, fewer people wore masks, and many attended large gatherings. The disease quickly gained the upper hand. The country is now scrambling to get people to vaccinate and to use masks again.
“Wearing masks should probably be one of the last things we stop doing,” says Hoen, adding that she hopes no other countries are looking to the United States for guidance.
Masks and mandates
The case for mask mandates was made relatively early in the pandemic. On 6 April 2020, the city of Jena, Germany, became one of the first communities in the world to require people to wear masks in public. Thomas Nitzsche, the town’s mayor, says he was sleepless for two nights before the policy went into effect. “I didn’t know if the public would comply,” he says. “Luckily, they did.”
Researchers estimate that new cases in the city, home to around 110,000 people, dropped by about 75% during the 20 days after the rule was brought in3.
But it wasn’t as simple as flipping a switch one day and then reaping the rewards. Evidence is building that, although a mandate can be a powerful measure, effective messaging and role models are crucial for public uptake.
A sign about mask requirements goes up at a shop in Wales, UK, after regulations changed there in September.Credit: Matthew Horwood/Getty
In the days leading up to the order in Jena, city officials launched a campaign to give the local population an idea of what was to come. Posters around the city declared “Jena zeigt Maske” (“Jena shows mask”), and Nitzsche posed for photos on a city tram wearing a mask.
Making the case for masks, and making them obligatory early on, was a common-sense move for Nitzsche. Meanwhile, mask policies in most of the surrounding state of Thuringia and elsewhere in Germany lagged behind. There, officials generally adopted mandates only after case counts surged. Although there were no new COVID-19 cases in Jena five days after implementation of the mask mandate, for example, the virus continued to spread in nearby Erfurt, the state capital, and slowed only after a mask requirement was imposed, according to a preprint study4 by public-health leaders in Jena.
It was a similar story around the globe, with a few exceptions. China and other Asian nations quickly adopted mask policies that probably prevented large-scale spread of the disease. Nitzsche says he was personally inspired by the Czech Republic, which began requiring masks in certain public places in mid-March 2020.
Klaus Wälde, an economist at Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, says that the rest of the country should have followed Jena’s lead. But the asynchronous mask mandates across Germany — and elsewhere — provided Wälde and others with a unique opportunity.
He and his colleagues used data from 401 regions in Germany to estimate the effect of mask mandates on SARS-CoV-2 transmission3. They took advantage of the regional variation to create artificial controls, and then estimated what would have happened had the intervention not been implemented. His team’s conclusion: requiring people to wear face masks decreases the daily growth rate of reported COVID-19 cases by more than 40%. The economists’ approach was “clever”, says Hoen. “This adds to the body of evidence that masks work.”
In a similar study in the United States, published this January5, researchers found that a national mandate for employees to wear face masks early in the pandemic could have reduced the weekly growth rate of cases and deaths by more than 10 percentage points in late April 2020. The study suggests that this could have reduced deaths by as much as 47% (or by nearly 50,000) across the country by the end of May last year. Another preprint, published in October, linked mask mandates with a 20–22% weekly reduction in COVID-19 cases in Canada6.
Still, US data suggest that regulation alone might not have been enough to produce a benefit from masks. In a survey of more than 350,000 people, published this March, self-reported mask wearing increased separately from government mask mandates7. The mandates do have an effect, “but when we looked at it, it was really the behaviour of the population that was a better metric”, says John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the study. “There’s a difference between government policy and community buy-in.”
The research builds on evidence from hundreds of observational and laboratory studies, which find that masks protect both the wearer and the people around them. Masks can block viral particles that hitch rides on droplets and aerosols. And a study from the US National Institutes of Health, published this February, further suggests that the humidity that builds up inside a mask could help to bolster the lungs’ defences against pathogens8.
Still, the debate over the effectiveness of masks, and whether or not they continue to be necessary, trundles on. What will it take to get people to wear masks in countries that still mandate them, and, in the United States, if infections surge again? What will motivate the unvaccinated everywhere to mask up, especially as pandemic fatigue continues to rise? Some researchers have looked to lessons from previous crises.
Protective barriers
Early in the HIV–AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, public-health officials faced a major challenge in trying to slow the spread of the virus. The problem wasn’t necessarily convincing people that a physical barrier — in this case, a condom — could prevent infection. “I don’t think the issue was so much about the level of protection as it was the perception of risk,” says Ronald Valdiserri, an epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Whereas homosexual men on the east and west coasts of the United States couldn’t ignore the widespread deaths in the gay community early in the epidemic, many heterosexuals saw HIV–AIDS as a “gay disease”, and did not consider themselves at risk of infection, he says.
The early days of COVID-19 drew a tragic parallel in many places. “You had people thinking, ‘Well, you know, this is not something that’s going to affect my community, or my town, or my neighbourhood. So, why should I be wearing a mask?’” says Valdiserri, who co-authored a paper on how the lessons from research on promoting condom use during the early HIV epidemic could inform face-mask policy9. “Like any human behaviour, it’s more complex than saying, ‘Thou shalt do this.’”
A protester displays their displeasure with mask mandates in London.Credit: Henry Nicholls/Reuters
Public-health efforts to combat HIV–AIDS have revolved around tailoring the condom-use message and its delivery to different populations. Among sex workers in sub-Saharan Africa, peers have proved to be the best spokespeople. Popular footballers have successfully marketed condom use to men. When HIV swept through San Francisco and New York in the early 1980s, an effective campaign included an attractive gay man communicating to other gay men, and making condoms “fun and sexy”, says Susan Hassig, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Tulane University in New Orleans.
But could face masks ever be made fun or sexy? Although there’s been no formal study on the effectiveness of mask marketing, the idea might not be far-fetched. Instructions for creating fun masks for children are easy to find, as are shops selling bedazzled masks for adults. At the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, California, in March, stars drew attention with masks that matched their outfits.
Helene-Mari van der Westhuizen, a public-health scientist at the University of Oxford, UK, laments how early COVID-19 guidelines framed masks as “sterile and scary” — medical objects that required specific handling and use, including specific temperatures for washing. “Cloth masks and associated fashion brought playfulness and an everyday feeling to mask wearing. That contributed to its acceptability,” says van der Westhuizen, who co-authored a paper arguing that policies should consider masking as a social behaviour, not a medical one10.
Balance and nuance are still important: masks need to work. “Masks with valves became really fashionable,” she adds, even though they allow virus particles from infected people to spread. “That’s an example of fashion gone awry,” says van der Westhuizen.
Further complicating mask use is the fact that masks are not all created equal. Simple cloth masks will “do a good job of protecting others from you, but don’t necessarily do a great job of protecting you from others”, says Jeremy Howard, a research scientist at the University of San Francisco, who co-authored a January review on face masks11. At the other extreme, medical-grade N95 masks might be overkill, he says. They are tested with much higher air pressures than what comes from normal breathing. Although they do protect the wearer, he instead recommends the widely available and more-comfortable KN95 masks.
“It’s time for nuanced messaging,” adds Gandhi, who co-authored a separate review on the effectiveness of various face masks in January12. She says that Germany did the right thing in specifying acceptable masks in its messaging. Cloth masks are no longer enough to comply with the mandate in Jena, or anywhere in the country. In January, Germany began requiring medical-grade or surgical masks in public spaces. The country, which has lagged behind the United States in vaccination rates, further upgraded its rule in April, mandating N95 or KN95 masks on public transport. The country is distributing masks to people who are at high risk of disease and those who can’t afford them. And leaders are enforcing their use. “If you’re not wearing a mask, you’ll get fined,” says Nitzsche. “Or people will start to stare at you.”
Cultural change
South Korea is among the east Asian countries that had a head start on the West. A pre-existing culture of mask use bolstered quick and widespread adoption after the emergence of COVID-19 — a stark contrast to Western nations, where even public-health officials at the World Health Organization and the US CDC were initially dissuading their use, describing them as unhelpful or even harmful.
The culture makes a difference, says Hong Bin Kim, who studies internal medicine and infectious disease at Seoul National University College of Medicine, and is author of a paper detailing mask use in South Korea13. Bin’s work also highlights the importance of leaders serving as models for the public. Politicians and doctors filled that role in his country, much like Nitzsche and public-health officials did in Jena.
Although it’s unlikely that the United States and other Western nations will adopt the same level of mask use beyond this pandemic, van der Westhuizen anticipates it will become much more common and acceptable than before. “It’s truly remarkable how widespread this new habit has become,” she says. “We have gained a valuable preventative tool.”
She is referring to more than COVID-19 and its variants, or even influenza. Tuberculosis, for example, has been a leading cause of death in South Africa and a long-time focus of her research. Although data show that masks could help to control the spread of that disease, social norms and stigma have impeded their adoption14. When initial COVID-19 guidelines suggested only people with symptoms needed to wear masks, she says, her thoughts immediately went to tuberculosis, for which public-health officials have made similar concessions. Thankfully, mask recommendations evolved. “The pandemic has broken that previous stigma,” says van der Westhuizen.
Hassig is reminded of other public-health interventions. The use of vehicle seat belts first arrived in the United States and United Kingdom as a recommendation, then became a law, for instance. Eventually, police began fining those who were non-compliant, and buckling up became the norm. “Very rarely does a public-health intervention wind up being widely accepted without some kind of enforcement mechanism,” says Hassig, who still wears a mask despite being fully vaccinated, in part to encourage mask wearing.
Perkins, meanwhile, has to police her customers in rural New Hampshire — a challenging task without the backing of a state or federal mandate. At least once a day, she says, she gets a customer who asks why the shop still requires masks. One man even chose to leave rather than put on the free mask she offered him. “People just keep asking ‘why, why, why, why?’ Some people have very strong feelings about it,” says Perkins. “I just keep telling people this is our policy at this time. It will change when we feel it is okay to do so.”
Nature593, 495-498 (2021)
References
1.
Boyarski, B. J. et al.J. Am. Med. Assoc. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2021.7489 (2021).
2.
Bulfone, T. C., Malekinejad, M., Rutherford, G. W. & Razani, N. J. Inf. Dis.223, 550–561 (2021).
3.
Mitze, T. et al.Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA117, 32293–32301 (2020).
Following a second-place finish at the NCAA Regional Championship, senior Mark Goetz of the West Virginia University golf team has been named the WVU Student-Athlete of the Week. It is the third such honor over a three-month span for Goetz.
The Greensburg, Pennsylvania, native finished 8-under-par at the tournament after shooting a 2-over-par and ranking 33rd on day one. Goetz charged on moving day to a tie for fourth place with a 6-under-par 66 on Tuesday. In the final round, Goetz shot a 4-under-par 68 and finished second out of 72 golfers in the Noblesville Regional with rounds of 74-66-68=208.
Goetz was only two strokes behind Cole Bradley of Purdue, who secured his win on the 17th hole. For the week, Goetz recorded 14 birdies and two eagles.
This Week in Golf: The 2020-21 season is complete until next year’s season begins in September.
Last Week in Golf: Senior Mark Goetz fell one spot short of winning the NCAA Regional and advancing to the NCAA Golf Championship during the final round at The Sagamore Golf Cub in Noblesville, Indiana … Goetz and Cole Bradley of Purdue were tied at 8-under-par entering the 17th hole … Bradley secured a birdie on No. 17 to take a one-shot lead and went on to win the regional by two strokes over Goetz … Bradley finished round three with a tournament-low score of 65, including five birdies on the final seven holes … after shooting a 2-over-par 74 and ranking 33rd on day one, Goetz charged on moving day to a tie for fourth place with a 6-under-par 66 … in the final round, the Greensburg, Pennsylvania, native shot a 4-under-par 68 … Goetz finished second out of 72 golfers in the Noblesville Regional with rounds of 74-66-68=208 … for the week, Goetz recorded 14 birdies and two eagles.
Quote: “I’m so proud of Mark. He played great. He’s always been talented, but he has matured these past two seasons and has developed into one of the best players in the country. The reason he has success is because of his preparation and his process. It’s funny that a kid from Western Pennsylvania, who only had one scholarship offer and that was from a restarted golf program at WVU, just nearly won an NCAA Regional against some of the best amateurs in the world. I think that speaks to Mark’s talent, work ethic and matured mindset. I’m so excited about next year’s team with Mark coming back for a fifth season. I know we didn’t have the team here this week, but Mark felt like he was playing for us all, sending a message of what to expect out of the Mountaineers next season.” – Coach Sean Covich
This Week in Track and Field: Four members of the West Virginia University track and field team have qualified for the 2021 NCAA Division I Outdoor Track and Field East Preliminary Round, from May 27-29, in Jacksonville, Florida … the events will begin at 1:30 p.m. on Wednesday and Thursday, as well as 1 p.m. on Friday and Saturday … redshirt junior Hayley Jackson (1,500 meters), junior Kathernie Dowie and redshirt freshman Ceili McCabe (3,000 meter steeplechase); as well as junior Peter-Gay McKenzie (long jump) all ranked in the top 48 of the NCAA East Region in their respective events and will compete.
Last Week in Track and Field: West Virginia was off last week.
Notes: Jackson, who last ran in the 2019 East Prelims, is set to make her second career appearance at the NCAA Championships, while Dowie, McCabe and McKenzie will make their regional debut … McCabe enters the event ranked No. 1 in the Big 12 and No. 30 nationally in the 3,000 meter steeplechase, with a top time of 9:58.62 at the Mountaineer Twilight, on May 1, in Morgantown, West Virginia … the time was good for an outdoor school record … the Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, native is coming off of a first-place, gold-medal performance at the 2021 Big 12 Outdoor Track and Field Championship, on May 15, in Manhattan, Kansas … McCabe’s winning time of 10:08.69 ranks fifth-place in outdoor program history … Dowie ranks No. 3 in the Big 12 in the 3,000 meter steeplechase and No. 68 in the nation … the Carisbrook, Victoria, Australia, native qualified for this year’s regional meet after recording a season-best time of 10:15.75 at the Mountaineer Twilight, on May 1, in Morgantown, West Virginia … at the Big 12 Championship, Dowie had an All-Big 12 performance in the 3,000-meter steeplechase with a fifth-place finish in 10:32.23 … Jackson ran a season-best time of 4:21.92 in the 1,500 meters at the EKU Twilight, on April 16, in Richmond, Kentucky, good for No. 7 in the Big 12 … the Lusby, Maryland, native had an All-Big 12 performance and a seventh-place, podium finish in the 1,500-meter race (4:32.33) at the Big 12 Championship … McKenzie is set to compete in the long jump competition in Jacksonville … the Clarendon, Jamaica, native tallied a career-best mark of 6.14 meters in the event at the Virginia Challenge on April 16, earning a sixth-place finish … the distance ranks No. 16 in the Big 12 and No. 42 in the region entering the NCAA East Preliminary Round.
This Week in Baseball: The eighth-seeded Mountaineers begin postseason play at the 2021 Phillips 66 Big 12 Baseball Championship against No. 9-seed Kansas on Tuesday, May 25, at Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma … the single-elimination matchup is slated to begin at 7 p.m. ET, with the winner advancing to the double-elimination tournament.
Last Week in Baseball: West Virginia (23-25, 8-16 Big 12) closed regular-season play by dropping two-of-three games at No. 2 Texas, from May 20-22, in Austin, Texas … the Mountaineers won the series opener, 5-4, good for the highest-ranked win in program history … the win helped West Virginia extend its season-long win streak to six games … from there, WVU fell, 14-3 and 12-2 in eight innings, in the final two games of the series … senior left-handed pitcher Jackson Wolf earned the win over the Longhorns in Game 1 of the series, his fifth of the year, while sophomore right-hander Jacob Watters nailed down his fourth save … the Mountaineers hit three homers to begin the series, one each from freshman infielder/designated hitter Nathan Blasick, senior catcher/outfielder Paul McIntosh and fifth-year senior infielder Kevin Brophy … the big fly was one of two for Brophy on the weekend … the Randolph, New Jersey, native led the way by finishing 3-for-8 (.375) with two homers, two runs scored and four RBI in the three-game set.
Notes: WVU is 13-12 all-time at the Big 12 Championship since joining the conference in 2013 … West Virginia is one of two schools to reach the semifinals in each of the last four years the event has been played, including two Championship Game appearances (2016, 2019) … the 2020 tournament was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic … the Mountaineers have won multiple games at four straight conference tournaments and five times in the last seven seasons … West Virginia leads Kansas, 15-11, in the all-time series, including 2-1 in 2021 … WVU won two-of-three games over the Jayhawks, from March 26-27, in Morgantown … the winner of Tuesday’s matchup advances to take on No. 1-seed Texas on Wednesday … the Mountaineers won eight of their final 12 games of the regular season … junior outfielder Austin Davis continues to lead WVU at the plate with a .317 average … WVU has homered in 10 of its last 12 games … fifth-year senior infielder Kevin Brophy and senior catcher/outfielder Paul McIntosh co-lead the club with eight big flies this spring … WVU’s 498 strikeouts as a pitching staff are good for No. 4 in single-season program history … Wolf’s 98 strikeouts are five away from matching Nick Snyder (2019) from No. 10 in single-season WVU history … he’s also seven punchouts away from Jerry Meadows (1967) for No. 9 and 10 off Frank Barron’s (1915) total for No. 8.
Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.
Dade Phelan, a Republican state representative from conservative southeast Texas, turned heads in 2019 when he said publicly that he was “done talking about bashing on the gay community” in the Legislature, session after session.
“It’s completely unacceptable,” he said on The Texas Tribune podcast Point of Order, referring to his actions that year to revive language shielding LGBTQ employees from discrimination in a worker protection bill.
A year later, as he tried to wrap up his bid to become the next speaker of the Texas House, those comments carried weight with Democrats deciding which of the Republican candidates to back. Several Democrats lined up behind Phelan, giving him the win, reassured he would avoid controversial social issues that targeted LGBTQ Texans.
But in the final days of Phelan’s first session in charge, he has indicated support for Senate Bill 29, a controversial bill that would force student athletes to play on sports teams based on their biological sex instead of their gender identity.
Phelan has not commented publicly on the bill and declined comment for this story. But SB 29 was set on Tuesday’s “Major State Calendar,” which is something of a priority list of bills for the day, intended to show the House speaker’s support to the rest of the body. The move fast-tracks its consideration by the House even as the chamber faces a deadline to pass all Senate bills by Tuesday at midnight.
Gov. Greg Abbott has said he would sign such a proposal into law and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who presides over the Senate, made the bill a priority in his chamber.
Disappointed Democrats
Democrats and LGBTQ activists have called SB 29 discriminatory against transgender people. The bill’s proponents say the legislation is needed to protect women’s sports, arguing that allowing transgender women or girls to play on the same teams as cisgender women and girls would give them an unfair advantage since they have higher levels of testosterone.
Officials with the University Interscholastic League have told lawmakers they have not been able to identify any cases of transgender athletes disrupting Texas school sports.
“It’s very disappointing to see SB 29 put on the calendar,” said Farmers Branch Democrat Julie Johnson, a member of the Texas House LGBTQ Caucus who was among those swayed by Phelan’s comments in 2019. “We thought we’d had very productive conversations about the harmful impacts that discrimination has on the children of Texas.”
“Speaker Phelan has supported that up until this point,” Johnson said. “We felt like we had really made progress in terms of educating and seeking commitments that this kind of discriminatory maneuver wouldn’t be seen on the House floor.”
Andrea Segovia, policy and field coordinator for the Transgender Education Network of Texas, said she was also hopeful when Phelan became speaker because she remembered his comments about not attacking the LGBTQ community.
But this session, Segovia said, she’s been disappointed. Phelan has ducked opportunities to speak out publicly in favor of LGBTQ Texans during a year in which the Legislature has considered many bills that would impact their lives, she said.
“That is a lot to be silent on,” she said. “He still has time to be an ally. We have to have their backs because if we don’t, nobody does. And the speaker has made that clear, that he does not have the backs of trans youth.”
Phelan has been up against political forces on both sides of the aisle when it comes to issues this session related to LGBTQ Texans. In addition to restricting transgender youth in sports, fellow Republicans have pushed Phelan on legislation that would ban gender-confirming health care, like hormone therapy and surgery, for minors.
A House version of that proposal, House Bill 1399, advanced far enough that it nearly made it to the House floor but fell victim to a bill-killing deadline.
SB 29, which has already passed in the upper chamber, is slated to be heard in the House on Tuesday morning. That means Democrats could defeat the bill by running out the clock with procedural tactics on bills that come up before it. But because the legislation is so high on that day’s calendar, Democrats would have to play defense most of the day.
That realization has rubbed some Democrats the wrong way, including state Rep. Celia Israel, D-Austin, a member of the LGBTQ Caucus who faulted Phelan and his leadership team for letting the bill get so far in the legislative process, especially after Republicans have run the table on other priority bills on guns, abortion and elections.
Now Democrats will have to delay to kill the bill even though Israel says some Republicans are also privately against it.
“Why can’t you just do the right thing and say no?” she said.
Pressure from his right
The perception that Phelan was more friendly to the LGBTQ community than other Republicans loomed over his bid for the gavel last year. While the perception may have earned him some Democratic support, it also generated some resistance on his right, with the social conservative group Texas Values declaring it “strongly” opposed Phelan becoming speaker.
“Rep. Phelan used his power last session to advance the LGBT agenda and we have not forgotten,” Texas Values’ president, Jonathan Saenz, said at the time.
One of the Texas GOP’s eight legislative priorities is “Children and Gender Modification,” and the party’s chairman, Allen West, has aggressively lobbied for it, especially in the closing days of the session.
Jill Glover, who chairs the state party’s legislative priorities committee, noted that “Children and Gender Modification” was the third-highest-rated priority when delegates to the Texas GOP convention picked them last year. She also pointed out that 95% of Republican primary voters in 2020 voted for a ballot proposition that expressed support for outlawing such treatments for minors.
“We are very disappointed in Speaker Phelan,” Glover said, adding that Abbott also has not spoken out about the proposal. “I think there’s plenty of blame to go around.”
Marco Roberts, who chairs the statewide Log Cabin Republicans, which represents gay conservatives, said in an interview Monday that “from what we see so far, we don’t have an objection” to how Phelan has navigated the issue. Roberts said it was his personal opinion that Phelan has “kind of delivered … what he said he would do, and that is navigate the different factions of the legislative body.”
Last month, all four chapters of the group across Texas unanimously adopted a policy position in support of SB 29 and its House companion, with a couple caveats.
“While we may have reservations about the bills’ lack of nuance allowing schools latitude to address very unique situations, and about the issues it leaves unresolved that will certainly arise if this bill becomes law, we nonetheless believe this law takes a necessary step in protecting interscholastic athletic activities that are currently segregated by biological sex for the benefit and safety of both girls and boys,” the policy position said.
Bills targeting transgender youth have been too much to stomach for some other red — arguably more conservative — states this year. In March, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem rejected an initial version of a bill passed by that state’s Legislature to restrict participation by transgender girls and women in athletics, sending the proposal back to lawmakers with suggested revisions. In April, another GOP governor, Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, vetoed legislation to ban gender-confirming treatment for minors, though state lawmakers subsequently overrode the veto.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association sent a warning shot at states like Texas last month, saying it would only hold college championships in states where transgender student-athletes can compete without discrimination.
LGBTQ advocates have said that just the discussion of these bills has a negative impact on transgender kids. Ninety-four percent of LGBTQ youth said recent politics had negatively impacted their mental health, according to the Trevor Project’s 2021 National Survey on LGBTQ Young Mental Health.
Angela Hale, senior adviser at Equality Texas, said she has helped families with transgender children meet with Phelan and his staff. While Hale said her group is relieved that other bills targeting transgender Texans have failed to meet legislative deadlines, she is still concerned that Senate Bill 29 has a shot at receiving the House’s approval.
“We are going to do everything we can to defeat the bill,” she said. “I do not want to have to look into the faces of these parents and tell them that their state leaders have failed to protect the most vulnerable children in the state. I remain hopeful that we will be able to defeat all of the anti-trans legislation so that trans children are protected.”
Disclosure: Equality Texas has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Author Matt Cain: ‘I’ve spoken to many gay men who came out later in life who’ve told me about the lies they’d spun for decades’
(Alicia Clarke)
“You’re so gay!” Over the years I’ve heard comments like this countless times. Because my gayness is obvious; it’s there in my humour, my taste in music, the way I walk and, in particular, the way I talk. I’ve never had what’s known as “passing privilege” – the ability to pass for straight.
When I was growing up, this prompted savage and relentless homophobic bullying, which shaped who I am and determined my life choices well into adulthood. It also politicised me. Having experienced prejudice first hand, I could hardly deny it existed. I didn’t have the choice of burying my head in the sand.
On the positive side, over the past 20 years my obvious gayness has tended to endear me to people. Often within minutes of meeting me, straight women will tell me they love gays, or all their best friends are gay, or they feel like a “gay man trapped in a woman’s body”. Usually what this means is they’re loud, have a bawdy sense of humour, like drinking or enjoy casual sex and then regaling everyone with stories about it.
Although I’ve always been happy to accept any positive response to my sexuality – sometimes even revelling in it – I’m also very aware that ideas like these can reinforce reductive and often damaging stereotypes. Stereotypes that often don’t apply to gay men with passing privilege.
For a long time, I envied these men. I used to think they had it easy. They could cruise through their school years, maybe snogging the occasional girl to obliterate any traces of suspicion, then come out of the closet when it suited them, usually once they’d bagged themselves a gorgeous boyfriend. (Because they always seemed to bag themselves a gorgeous boyfriend. Amongst gay men, their masculinity was highly prized. As “real men”, we considered them wildly attractive.)
Later in life, however, I’d hear many men with passing privilege complain about female acquaintances inviting them out for dancing or cocktails, or on a shopping or spa day – only to be disappointed by their lack of interest. “You’re not a proper gay,” the girls would tell them. “You might as well be straight.” I’d sometimes hear these men complain about not feeling represented by the gay men most visible in the mainstream media, such as Graham Norton and Alan Carr. If I ever heard them saying we no longer needed Pride or – heaven forbid – confess to voting Tory, I’d resent their lack of political awareness.
Then, when I was editor-in-chief of Attitude magazine, we ran a series of interviews in which gay celebrities with passing privilege discussed the challenges they’d faced. They discussed their struggle to understand who they were, their fear of coming out of the closet, and their battles with self-loathing, alcoholism and sex addiction. I found it difficult to empathise.
It was only when I started writing my new novel, The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle, that my empathy stirred. The novel’s lead character is a gay man in his sixties who’s shy, socially awkward and quite firmly in the closet. After a series of crises, he realises that he wants to be happy – and the only way to do this is to search for his lost love, a man he hasn’t seen for nearly 50 years. I won’t give away whether or not he finds him – or how the men were originally forced apart – but I will say that Albert’s journey encourages him to accept his true self and to be more open and honest with others.
While writing the book, it struck me that it was only because Albert could pass for straight that he had the option of taking refuge from a hostile world in the closet. And who can blame him for taking it? But the longer he sheltered in there, the more daunting the idea of stepping out of it became.
I’ve spoken to many gay men who came out later in life who’ve told me about the lies they’d spun for decades, or the sham marriages they entered into, or the families they started in order to put people off the scent, or to try and “straighten themselves out”, to try and make themselves “normal”. But sexuality is like one of those inflatable unicorns you see on Instagram in the swimming pools of Palm Springs – yes, you can push it underwater but sooner or later it will come bursting to the surface, often causing a huge splash in the process. This can leave men with so-called passing privilege suffering from terrible guilt – guilt about being dishonest or exploiting other people in their desperation to protect themselves.
I started to wonder if the ability to pass for straight might not be a privilege after all. I started to wonder if it might even be a curse.
This doesn’t in any way invalidate my own feelings. It doesn’t invalidate the fear and self-loathing I suffered after years of being told I was dirty and disgusting. It doesn’t invalidate the terror I experienced when I came out – to friends at the age of 18 and then my parents at the age of 20. But, as any gay man will tell you, life can only get better once you have come out. No matter how difficult this may seem, you’ve just got to push through it. I’m now glad my lack of passing privilege hurried along the process.
Thankfully, British society has changed immeasurably since I was growing up. I never imagined that one day I’d live in a society in which gay men enjoy equal rights – and aren’t just accepted but often celebrated (even if this celebration can sometimes be clumsy). I could never have imagined a society in which, yes, certain stereotypes might persist, but there’s a much greater understanding that gay men come in all different shapes, sizes and colours of the rainbow – as do people from across the entire LGBT+ spectrum.
This undoubtedly makes coming out a far less daunting prospect for the majority of people considering it today. And, if the same progress continues, it will hopefully mean that in the future, I won’t be able to write another character like Albert Entwistle. He couldn’t plausibly exist.
Social networks and the companies that run them are seemingly never out of the spotlight at the moment. Whether its pressures from high above to protect users through to new trends breaking through, the land of social media is continuously evolving.
A fine example of this evolution recently came in the form of Tesla and Donald Trump who have both gone public with plans to build their own social networks in recent weeks. And they’ve both certainly had their critics, many of whom believe they’ll struggle to lift off without the sheer scale of the major platforms. But, despite the two seemingly having very little in common, I actually believe they both have a high chance of success. A worrying thought perhaps when you consider Trump found himself rightly removed from Twitter for using the platform to incite violence and share extremely questionable views to millions of people on a daily basis.
However, to elucidate why I think these networks might have a chance of succeeding, we need to dig into the two main reasons why I think both are onto a winner in building their own social networks. The first of these is passion. At the very heart of it, both Donald Trump and Tesla have a core audience who are passionate. At the last US Presidential Election, Trump supporters backed him by the tens of millions. And the demand for Teslas shows no sign of slowing down, showing just how popular the car brand has become.
The second reason is a slightly more interesting one – commonality. Put simply, each community will have lots of other things in common that are completely unrelated to Tesla or Donald Trump.
In Trump’s case, some of these might be politically contentious. But equally, they may not. Whilst it’s impossible to know without looking at the data, commonalities between Trump’s often vociferous supporters could range across anything from predictable areas like, say, gun control or immigration, to surprising things like taste in music or preferred auto brands.
In Tesla’s case, we can safely assume interests in green technology would rank highly. But they may also find shared interest groups springing up in cryptocurrency, manga, memes and music. Or even completely counterintuitive areas that you’d never think to list. The brand in itself has become synonymous with other interests.
And these commonalities are something we’ve learned a lot about at Disciple over the last year.
Some examples include BLKOUTUK, a community for black bi, gay and trans men to get together and share about their challenges. Some exciting interesting and potentially exciting commonalities for this group include entrepreneurship and policy advocacy.
MORE FOR YOU
Then on the entertainment side, one of our communities is for fans of country music star Luke Bryan – and their commonly shared interests include Nascar and BBQs.
This is a phenomenon that social giants like Facebook have recognised for a long time, and they’ve been able to exploit it using smart algorithms to target ads. So, for example, let’s say you once commented on a picture of a bike, and you’ve never interacted with any content about football. Facebook knows you like bikes and doesn’t know if you like football or not. Facebook can send you ads on products you’ve never expressed an interest in, just because of interest from lots of people who like the other things you like. The network now knows there’s a high probability that, as a bike-liker, you’ll like football too. Now extend this principle across millions of different, disparate, interconnected interests, and you’ve got an interest targeting algorithm. Common interests and behaviours have been integral to enabling businesses to raise their profile through the network, whilst also making it vast sums of money.
So, both interpersonal connections and commonalities between groups are crucial if a digital network is to be successful. But now, ironically, some experts think Facebook may be throwing away their competitive advantage in this space in pursuit of higher content engagement.
In a recent conversation with Lex Fridman, Deep Work author Cal Newport made the case that content is starting to take priority over connection on some networks – and that actual communities of people are connecting elsewhere. Facebook is pursuing attention at all costs, with hour upon hour of hypnotising but shallow content. But as this content takes up more and more on-screen real estate, they are providing less and less opportunity to connect with other humans. The very essence of a social network might actually be eroding.
And now competition is heating up. Brands and celebrities like Tesla and Trump are starting to realise they don’t necessarily need the huge major platforms in order to access their niche audiences. Private communities not only help in building stronger connections, but also long lasting ones; as they are a world away from noisy attention-seeking platforms like Facebook.
Take fitness influencers as a more real-world example. Many of those we speak to everyday often find they might get thousands of likes for their photos on Instagram – but relatively little actual interaction with their followers outside of that. The value the influencers are getting from the engagement is actually quite low.
But when they build their own communities, all of a sudden conversation explodes between all of their members, who start to realise all the things they have in common. Instagram may be providing the scale at the top end of the funnel – but the real connection and commonality is happening in their own private network. That’s where the real power is.
And this same process is happening across thousands of diverse interest and passion areas every day as this trend picks up pace. So, far from flopping for want of the millions of eyeballs provided by the major platforms – I believe it’s likely that Tesla and Donald Trump will blaze a trail for many other brands and celebrities, who’ll realise real connections can be made better outside of what we know to be the traditional social networks but instead in a self-contained, passionate community.
The Los Angeles Dodgers will host their eighth annual LGBTQ+ Night at Dodger Stadium, presented by Blue Shield of California, on Friday, June 11.
A special-event ticket package includes a game ticket in the fully vaccinated-only section for the 7:10 p.m. game against the Texas Rangers and an exclusive Dodger Pride-themed T-shirt. Tickets are available at dodgers.com/LAPride.
Dodger owners Billie Jean King and Ilana Kloss will be in attendance. The Dodgers and long-time community nonprofit partner LA Pride will celebrate the LGBTQ+ community with drink specials in the pavilion bars, a special recognition of frontline workers from Los Angeles’ LGBTQ+ community and additional guests.
Friday Night Fireworks will also return that night — set to a special mix from DJ Bowie Jane — and all vaccinated fans will be welcomed down to the field to view the show.
“The Dodgers take so much pride in celebrating Los Angeles’ LGBTQ+ community and are excited to host our eighth annual LGBTQ+ Night at Dodger Stadium, which continues to grow into one of the biggest Pride nights in all of professional sports,” said Erik Braverman, Dodgers senior vice president of marketing, communications and broadcasting.
“After a trying year apart, we’re looking forward to working with our great partners to welcome the LGBTQ+ community back to Dodger Stadium for a fun and safe in-person event.”
Pride Board President Sharon-Franklin Brown said her organization is looking forward to continuing its partnership and having the Dodgers’ support.
“Our LGBTQ+ Night is always a night our community looks forward to, and we know that this year it is more important than ever to have moments like this to bring our community together to celebrate Pride month,” Brown said.
In addition to LA Pride, the Dodgers work with many community partners for the night, including:
Outsports, a sports news website focusing on LGBT issues and personalities in amateur and professional sports. Outsports is the world’s leading gay-sports publication.
Varsity Gay League (V.G.L.) is the nation’s original Queer+ recreational sports league, established in 2007. With 25,000 members across 19 cities, V.G.L. is committed to promoting diversity and inclusion by connecting players of all ages and skill levels, however they identify, with new ways to socialize and play.
The Greater Los Angeles Softball Association (GLASA) is a gay and lesbian slow-pitch softball league committed to providing an opportunity for both gay and nongay participants to compete in an environment conducive to the gay community.
Hi Tops Sportsbar, a casual sports bar with an LGBTQ focus in West Hollywood.
To accommodate as many fans as possible for this event, all tickets available through the special event ticket pack link will be in the fully vaccinated-only sections.
In the fully vaccinated-only sections, social distancing will not be required, and fans will be seated directly next to other parties.
These sections will be reserved for fully vaccinated patrons (i.e., patrons age 16 and older for whom at least two weeks have passed since they received their final vaccine dose) and children between the ages of 2 and 15 who can provide proof of having tested negative for COVID-19.
Children younger than the age of 2 do not need to provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test. Face coverings must be worn in the fully vaccinated-only section, except while actively eating and/or drinking in the ticketed section. More information on the fully vaccinated-only sections is available at dodgers.com/vaccinationzone.
The only concert to commemorate Philadelphia’s Memorial Day, the Philly POPS Memorial Salute will take place on Saturday at 7 pm on the Man Center for the Performing Arts stage. Military personnel, veterans, police, firefighters, first responders, frontline workers and their families will be made available through affiliated locations and organizations.
“Philly POPS is very proud to bring POPS back on stage at the Memorial Salute Concert. COMcast, NBCUniversal and Welcome America helped offer tickets to the service community to celebrate and remember the day. Thank you for helping us make the day, “said Frank Giordano, President and CEO of POPS.
This year’s featured performer is the Multi-Grammy Award-nominated Ryan Show.
Shaw’s latest album is titled “Imagining Marvin”. In honor of one of the show’s idols, Marvin Gaye, it features many of the gay hits and five of the show’s own original songs.
“The concept was the brainchild of my manager, Elizabeth Healy,” recalls Shaw. “At that point, I left the world of music for a few years and started playing. I joined the Broadway of” Motown the Musical, “which played Stevie Wonder for two years. And later, in the same musical, I understood Marvin. “
Next, he played the soul of Michael Jackson in the role of the show at “Thriller Live” in London’s West End. He then returned to the United States to play Judas in “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Shortly thereafter, the idea of making an album dedicated to Marvin Gaye was born.
The show from Decatur, Georgia is no wonder to make music. In fact, the show, born into a highly religious family, began to impress people with voice at the age of three in a Pentecostal church, and performed his first solo at the age of five.
“People’s reaction to the way I sang realized that this was what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life. Of course, my church was so traditional that for a long time The only song I learned was a gospel song, “says Shaw, who is about to attend the Philly POPS Memorial Salute.
But he explains that as he grew older, his repertoire quickly changed. After graduating from high school, Shaw enrolled in Georgia State University, but left just a year after being tapped to participate in Tyler Perry’s play “I Know It’s Changed.” When the play was over, I realized that the show was in New York. And that’s where he stayed and lives in Harlem today.
Today, the show’s resume shows that he travels the world and shares the stage with celebrities such as Van Halen, John Legend, and BB King. He has also been featured as a guest on several TV talk shows and on TV shows such as “So You Think You Can Dance” and “Dancing With The Stars.”
As a concert artist, the show, who calls himself a “soulful rock singer,” made his debut at Radio City Music Hall with the benefits of a Dream Concert to build the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC. His Carnegie appearance was “African-American Cultural Heritage Festival curated by Jessye Norman.
The show admits he enjoyed it all and is particularly proud of his three Grammy nominations he claims.
“In terms of companion praise, being nominated for a Grammy can be seen as one of the highlights of your career,” says Shaw. “I know that many African Americans don’t put too much stock in the Grammy Awards. The voting panel consists of a group of white men who say we’re not enough. I think it’s just that. I thought so, but it’s not.
“So when I joined, I started encouraging all artists, especially African-American artists who keep complaining that they weren’t represented. It’s strictly a volunteer position. No one is paid. But if you want to change things, you need to volunteer, join the committee and become a voting member. That’s the only way to hear your voice. If no one votes for you, it doesn’t mean they don’t like it, it’s just that they don’t know you. “
A priest who heads a theology and philosophy school in Indonesia has sparked controversy by claiming the Catholic Church will probably accept same-sex marriages.
Divine Word Father Otto Gusti Madung’s comments were made last month during a talk with members of a group called Journalists Union for Diversity, which posted them on Facebook on May 23.
“In my opinion, it is possible that same-sex marriage will be recognized in the Catholic Church,” said the priest, who is also rector of the Ledalero Catholic School of Philosophy in Maumere, East Nusa Tenggara province.
Subscribe to your daily free newsletter from UCA News
Thank you. You are now signed up to Daily newsletter
The campus is known for its inclusiveness and for often inviting LGBT people to participate in events it hosts.
Father Madung said that religion and spirituality only have the legitimacy to exist if they side with marginalized people such as LGBT people and try to reduce suffering in the world.
The priest’s remarks have drawn criticism from Catholics who accused him of being a liberal who could cause serious damage to the Church.
Do not let us fall into the trap of Satan who works through liberal ideologies that fight for this
“What kind of view is this? Will the Catholic Church also give the sacrament for same-sex couples?” one Catholic called Elisabet Theodora asked in a social media post.
“Do not let us fall into the trap of Satan who works through liberal ideologies that fight for this,” said Karol Tefa.
“The teachings of the Roman Catholic Church do not need to be adapted to the lifestyle trends of other churches or institutions,” Inigo De Flores Lalong commented.
LGBT Catholics, however, welcomed the priest’s comment, saying it was a bold statement in response to their cries for acceptance.
Related News
“I’m overjoyed that there is a priest who has started to discuss this openly, although of course it is not easy for many people to accept, especially in the context of Indonesia where we are still considered abnormal,” Hendrika Mayora Victoria, a transgender woman, told UCA News.
“We still feel discrimination, including by the Church. Fortunately, I still feel strong because I believe that God, through the Holy Spirit, has given me the strength to endure.”
Father Madung told UCA News on May 24 that he believed the Church’s attitude will change because the basis for rejecting same-sex marriage is the natural law concept and acting against it is a sin.
The priest said the premise of natural law departs from scientific proof and that medical science leans to homosexuality being a natural thing. He pointed to the World Health Organization declassifying it as a mental illness in 1990.
The encounter with the victim can change people’s attitudes and form empathy
He said these findings were a sign of the times that challenge the Catholic Church to interpret the scriptures and its teachings in a new way, including those related to same-sex marriage.
“An interpretation of scripture and dogma is a product of history and a certain context and therefore it needs a new interpretation to speak for the people of today. Only then will the Church become a sign of God’s liberating presence,” Father Madung said.
Those reading historical events must use God’s eyes, which are “the eyes of solidarity, empathy, love and care, not the eyes of power that oppress or discriminate,” he added.
LGBT people “suffer greatly because they are discriminated against,” he said. “The encounter with the victim can change people’s attitudes and form empathy.”
As Thailand battles with the ongoing COVID19 pandemic, with the country reordering close to 3000 new cases on Monday alone, 62 men on Saturday night were arrested for allegedly being in breach of the country’s COVID-19 restrictions in a raid on a gay “chemsex” party.
The raid was conducted by 30 police after neighbours suggested a group sex activity may have been planned, and it is believed that this is the country’s largest such crackdown during the Covid-19 pandemic.
After making the arrests on Saturday night at Faros Sauna in Bangkok , Police Colonel Ekapop Tanprayoon, superintendent of Bangkok’s Wang Thong Lang District police station alleged that police had found used condoms, needles and drugs in the raid
Pol Col Ekkaphop said that “(In the past) we have reprimanded people for gathering to drink at home. But under the current circumstances, there shouldn’t be so many people in such a crowded area,” he said, explaining also that Faros Sauna 2 has “two buildings – one with 50 bedrooms – and a swimming pool and karaoke.”
Pol Col Ekkaphop added that following their arrest the men were taken to Wang Thonglang police station for questioning. The organisers and attendees of the party are now facing charges of violating Thailand’s COVID-19 restrictions, which were enforced last March and bring with them penalties of up to two years in prison and a fine of up to 40,000 baht ($1,276).
The men were also brought in for urine drug testing, with police detecting drugs in 30 of the men. They will now be charged with further drug related offences.
Thailand, a largely conservative Buddhist society, decriminalised homosexuality in 1956 and has a reputation for its relaxed attitude towards gender and sexual diversity. Yet LGBTQI communities in Thailand still often face discrimination and stigma in schools, the workplace and in healthcare facilities, and are often rejected by their families.
President of the Bangkok Rainbow Organisation, Mr Nikorn Chimkong, said he was concerned the arrests would contribute to the image of gay men being “promiscuous” and “spreading diseases”.
“Chemsex parties are a new normal amid the pandemic, and what is worrying is the health of those attending, such as the risks of contracting Covid-19 and HIV.
Every Wednesday evening, Andrzej Tokarski heads to his local park in Gdansk, named after the former US president Ronald Reagan, and sets up his weekly outdoor fitness session.
His workouts are aimed, predominantly, to be a welcoming space for members of the LGBT community. Yet the atmosphere was warm and the event became wider-reaching. A female friend brought along her young daughter. A couple of senior citizens joined in. The workouts brought together different generations in an inclusive way.
One evening in March, however, they were ambushed. More than two dozen men, sporting balaclavas and dressed in plain clothes, stormed the session. Tokarski suffered a broken tooth and a spinal injury. He was one of two members of the fitness group whose injuries required hospital treatment.
Speaking to The Athletic over Zoom, Tokarski says: “We were beaten and scared to death. Two of us were in hospital, the rest managed to escape.
You have full access to this article via your institution.
A sign is still posted on the front door of the Wolfeboro Food Co-op that reads, “Face masks required.” Until recently, another sign had hung directly below it, explaining how the New Hampshire market was following federal policy.
Erin Perkins, manager of the shop, removed that second sign on 14 May — the day after the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that fully vaccinated individuals, in most situations, no longer need to wear a mask. “We weren’t expecting that,” says Perkins. “It puts us in a precarious position. We were not about to start asking people if they are vaccinated or not.”
New Hampshire was the last state in New England to start mandating mask wearing in public to reduce the spread of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. And on 16 April, it became the first in the region to lift that mandate, joining several other states around the country that were loosening their pandemic-related restrictions. Cities and businesses in New Hampshire could still set their own policies, and Perkins wasn’t comfortable changing things right away. Even after the CDC announced its latest guidelines — just two weeks after communicating that vaccinated people should continue to mask up indoors — Perkins wasn’t personally comfortable with unmasked people in her shop. She also knows that several customers have immune systems that are compromised, and emerging research suggests that people in this group are still at risk even after vaccination1.
“Until we feel better about the state of things — until the numbers make a little bit more sense to us, we have decided to wait,” she says, even if that means dealing with testy customers.
Anne Hoen, an epidemiologist at Dartmouth College in nearby Hanover, can understand Perkins’s caution. She says that both the state and federal moves were probably a little too early. Hoen works in New Hampshire but lives just across the border in Vermont, where a state-wide indoor mask mandate remained in force until mid-May, despite Vermont having a lower rate of hospitalizations than practically anywhere else in the country. In the wake of the CDC’s announcement, Vermont Governor Phil Scott relaxed the mandate for fully vaccinated individuals.
The weakening policies are out of step with those of many other countries. Germany strengthened its mask requirements at the end of April, for example. It was facing a slowdown in vaccination rates and a surge in cases. Spain tightened its requirements at the end of March.
The evidence is clear that masks cut down on COVID-19 deaths, but nearly a year and a half into the pandemic and with vaccination coverage climbing in many places, public-health scientists and officials are still struggling to get people — particularly unvaccinated people — to wear masks at appropriate times. Average mask use across the United States has been declining since mid-February. Meanwhile, infection rates in some places have increased. A patchwork of policies and mixed messages from both politicians and public-health officials has resulted in confusion, consternation and a mess of data to interpret. “We’re all over the map,” says Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease physician at the University of California, San Francisco. “That’s been the problem this entire pandemic. We’ve been making it up as we go along.”
It wasn’t until late April, for example, that the US government finally distinguished between indoor and outdoor mask use in its recommendations, even though the science had been clear for months that the risk of transmission was much lower outdoors2. And now, after the CDC released its latest revision, agency director Rochelle Walensky noted that it could change its mask guidance yet again. Hoen and other epidemiologists warn that it is very difficult to reinstate a rule after it has been revoked.
Mask use will continue for this pandemic, and it’s likely to become a common response to future outbreaks. So researchers are trying to get a handle on what the science says about how to encourage people to wear them. As the COVID-19 pandemic enters a new phase, scientists around the world are accessing the accumulated data and asking what makes some policies more effective than others, and probing when and how they need to change.
Gandhi is among those who emphasize that mask messaging should evolve in light of rising vaccination rates. Officials should begin relaxing restrictions to give people hope and to motivate vaccination, she says. But changes need to be made carefully.
Around the same time that New Hampshire rescinded its rule, for example, COVID-19 cases in India began to surge. Strict mask mandates there had reined in the country’s first wave of infections last September. But as COVID-19 numbers came under control, fewer people wore masks, and many attended large gatherings. The disease quickly gained the upper hand. The country is now scrambling to get people to vaccinate and to use masks again.
“Wearing masks should probably be one of the last things we stop doing,” says Hoen, adding that she hopes no other countries are looking to the United States for guidance.
Masks and mandates
The case for mask mandates was made relatively early in the pandemic. On 6 April 2020, the city of Jena, Germany, became one of the first communities in the world to require people to wear masks in public. Thomas Nitzsche, the town’s mayor, says he was sleepless for two nights before the policy went into effect. “I didn’t know if the public would comply,” he says. “Luckily, they did.”
Researchers estimate that new cases in the city, home to around 110,000 people, dropped by about 75% during the 20 days after the rule was brought in3.
But it wasn’t as simple as flipping a switch one day and then reaping the rewards. Evidence is building that, although a mandate can be a powerful measure, effective messaging and role models are crucial for public uptake.
A sign about mask requirements goes up at a shop in Wales, UK, after regulations changed there in September.Credit: Matthew Horwood/Getty
In the days leading up to the order in Jena, city officials launched a campaign to give the local population an idea of what was to come. Posters around the city declared “Jena zeigt Maske” (“Jena shows mask”), and Nitzsche posed for photos on a city tram wearing a mask.
Making the case for masks, and making them obligatory early on, was a common-sense move for Nitzsche. Meanwhile, mask policies in most of the surrounding state of Thuringia and elsewhere in Germany lagged behind. There, officials generally adopted mandates only after case counts surged. Although there were no new COVID-19 cases in Jena five days after implementation of the mask mandate, for example, the virus continued to spread in nearby Erfurt, the state capital, and slowed only after a mask requirement was imposed, according to a preprint study4 by public-health leaders in Jena.
It was a similar story around the globe, with a few exceptions. China and other Asian nations quickly adopted mask policies that probably prevented large-scale spread of the disease. Nitzsche says he was personally inspired by the Czech Republic, which began requiring masks in certain public places in mid-March 2020.
Klaus Wälde, an economist at Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany, says that the rest of the country should have followed Jena’s lead. But the asynchronous mask mandates across Germany — and elsewhere — provided Wälde and others with a unique opportunity.
He and his colleagues used data from 401 regions in Germany to estimate the effect of mask mandates on SARS-CoV-2 transmission3. They took advantage of the regional variation to create artificial controls, and then estimated what would have happened had the intervention not been implemented. His team’s conclusion: requiring people to wear face masks decreases the daily growth rate of reported COVID-19 cases by more than 40%. The economists’ approach was “clever”, says Hoen. “This adds to the body of evidence that masks work.”
In a similar study in the United States, published this January5, researchers found that a national mandate for employees to wear face masks early in the pandemic could have reduced the weekly growth rate of cases and deaths by more than 10 percentage points in late April 2020. The study suggests that this could have reduced deaths by as much as 47% (or by nearly 50,000) across the country by the end of May last year. Another preprint, published in October, linked mask mandates with a 20–22% weekly reduction in COVID-19 cases in Canada6.
Still, US data suggest that regulation alone might not have been enough to produce a benefit from masks. In a survey of more than 350,000 people, published this March, self-reported mask wearing increased separately from government mask mandates7. The mandates do have an effect, “but when we looked at it, it was really the behaviour of the population that was a better metric”, says John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, and a co-author of the study. “There’s a difference between government policy and community buy-in.”
The research builds on evidence from hundreds of observational and laboratory studies, which find that masks protect both the wearer and the people around them. Masks can block viral particles that hitch rides on droplets and aerosols. And a study from the US National Institutes of Health, published this February, further suggests that the humidity that builds up inside a mask could help to bolster the lungs’ defences against pathogens8.
Still, the debate over the effectiveness of masks, and whether or not they continue to be necessary, trundles on. What will it take to get people to wear masks in countries that still mandate them, and, in the United States, if infections surge again? What will motivate the unvaccinated everywhere to mask up, especially as pandemic fatigue continues to rise? Some researchers have looked to lessons from previous crises.
Protective barriers
Early in the HIV–AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, public-health officials faced a major challenge in trying to slow the spread of the virus. The problem wasn’t necessarily convincing people that a physical barrier — in this case, a condom — could prevent infection. “I don’t think the issue was so much about the level of protection as it was the perception of risk,” says Ronald Valdiserri, an epidemiologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Whereas homosexual men on the east and west coasts of the United States couldn’t ignore the widespread deaths in the gay community early in the epidemic, many heterosexuals saw HIV–AIDS as a “gay disease”, and did not consider themselves at risk of infection, he says.
The early days of COVID-19 drew a tragic parallel in many places. “You had people thinking, ‘Well, you know, this is not something that’s going to affect my community, or my town, or my neighbourhood. So, why should I be wearing a mask?’” says Valdiserri, who co-authored a paper on how the lessons from research on promoting condom use during the early HIV epidemic could inform face-mask policy9. “Like any human behaviour, it’s more complex than saying, ‘Thou shalt do this.’”
A protester displays their displeasure with mask mandates in London.Credit: Henry Nicholls/Reuters
Public-health efforts to combat HIV–AIDS have revolved around tailoring the condom-use message and its delivery to different populations. Among sex workers in sub-Saharan Africa, peers have proved to be the best spokespeople. Popular footballers have successfully marketed condom use to men. When HIV swept through San Francisco and New York in the early 1980s, an effective campaign included an attractive gay man communicating to other gay men, and making condoms “fun and sexy”, says Susan Hassig, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Tulane University in New Orleans.
But could face masks ever be made fun or sexy? Although there’s been no formal study on the effectiveness of mask marketing, the idea might not be far-fetched. Instructions for creating fun masks for children are easy to find, as are shops selling bedazzled masks for adults. At the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, California, in March, stars drew attention with masks that matched their outfits.
Helene-Mari van der Westhuizen, a public-health scientist at the University of Oxford, UK, laments how early COVID-19 guidelines framed masks as “sterile and scary” — medical objects that required specific handling and use, including specific temperatures for washing. “Cloth masks and associated fashion brought playfulness and an everyday feeling to mask wearing. That contributed to its acceptability,” says van der Westhuizen, who co-authored a paper arguing that policies should consider masking as a social behaviour, not a medical one10.
Balance and nuance are still important: masks need to work. “Masks with valves became really fashionable,” she adds, even though they allow virus particles from infected people to spread. “That’s an example of fashion gone awry,” says van der Westhuizen.
Further complicating mask use is the fact that masks are not all created equal. Simple cloth masks will “do a good job of protecting others from you, but don’t necessarily do a great job of protecting you from others”, says Jeremy Howard, a research scientist at the University of San Francisco, who co-authored a January review on face masks11. At the other extreme, medical-grade N95 masks might be overkill, he says. They are tested with much higher air pressures than what comes from normal breathing. Although they do protect the wearer, he instead recommends the widely available and more-comfortable KN95 masks.
“It’s time for nuanced messaging,” adds Gandhi, who co-authored a separate review on the effectiveness of various face masks in January12. She says that Germany did the right thing in specifying acceptable masks in its messaging. Cloth masks are no longer enough to comply with the mandate in Jena, or anywhere in the country. In January, Germany began requiring medical-grade or surgical masks in public spaces. The country, which has lagged behind the United States in vaccination rates, further upgraded its rule in April, mandating N95 or KN95 masks on public transport. The country is distributing masks to people who are at high risk of disease and those who can’t afford them. And leaders are enforcing their use. “If you’re not wearing a mask, you’ll get fined,” says Nitzsche. “Or people will start to stare at you.”
Cultural change
South Korea is among the east Asian countries that had a head start on the West. A pre-existing culture of mask use bolstered quick and widespread adoption after the emergence of COVID-19 — a stark contrast to Western nations, where even public-health officials at the World Health Organization and the US CDC were initially dissuading their use, describing them as unhelpful or even harmful.
The culture makes a difference, says Hong Bin Kim, who studies internal medicine and infectious disease at Seoul National University College of Medicine, and is author of a paper detailing mask use in South Korea13. Bin’s work also highlights the importance of leaders serving as models for the public. Politicians and doctors filled that role in his country, much like Nitzsche and public-health officials did in Jena.
Although it’s unlikely that the United States and other Western nations will adopt the same level of mask use beyond this pandemic, van der Westhuizen anticipates it will become much more common and acceptable than before. “It’s truly remarkable how widespread this new habit has become,” she says. “We have gained a valuable preventative tool.”
She is referring to more than COVID-19 and its variants, or even influenza. Tuberculosis, for example, has been a leading cause of death in South Africa and a long-time focus of her research. Although data show that masks could help to control the spread of that disease, social norms and stigma have impeded their adoption14. When initial COVID-19 guidelines suggested only people with symptoms needed to wear masks, she says, her thoughts immediately went to tuberculosis, for which public-health officials have made similar concessions. Thankfully, mask recommendations evolved. “The pandemic has broken that previous stigma,” says van der Westhuizen.
Hassig is reminded of other public-health interventions. The use of vehicle seat belts first arrived in the United States and United Kingdom as a recommendation, then became a law, for instance. Eventually, police began fining those who were non-compliant, and buckling up became the norm. “Very rarely does a public-health intervention wind up being widely accepted without some kind of enforcement mechanism,” says Hassig, who still wears a mask despite being fully vaccinated, in part to encourage mask wearing.
Perkins, meanwhile, has to police her customers in rural New Hampshire — a challenging task without the backing of a state or federal mandate. At least once a day, she says, she gets a customer who asks why the shop still requires masks. One man even chose to leave rather than put on the free mask she offered him. “People just keep asking ‘why, why, why, why?’ Some people have very strong feelings about it,” says Perkins. “I just keep telling people this is our policy at this time. It will change when we feel it is okay to do so.”
Christian groups asked a federal court in Texas to exempt all employers from complying with LGBT anti-discrimination protections if they oppose homosexuality or “transgender behavior” on religious or non-religious grounds.
The U.S. Pastor Council, Braidwood Management Inc., and Bear Creek Bible Church say that last year’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of LGBT workers—which expanded protections under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to prohibit bias based on sexual orientation and transgender status—”substantially burdens” them from operating in “accordance with Christian teaching.”
The move is part of an ongoing class action in the U.S. District Court …
/static.texastribune.org/media/files/f289fed9500a4a738cb7537ce208ba20/Dade%20Phelan%20MG%20TT%2003.jpg)
