LGBTQ Breaking News Service

Traveling the world brings with it many different adventures and opportunities. Whether you’re looking to explore sunshine and beaches or you’re looking to discover jungles and new places, there is much to see out there. Travel broadens the mind, but why bother going it alone when you can discover much more by traveling with someone else? You’ll be able to explore new things together, share memories, and have more confidence too.

However, perhaps your situation has forced you to be alone, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The online world has created endless opportunities to connect with people from around the world. Whether you’re someone who wants to find a local companion or someone who lives in one of your chosen travel destinations, you can do much more when you use a site such as Gaysgodating to find a travel partner who’s also been engaged in an LGBT culture. So, how do you find someone online?

Take a Modern Approach

The reality is that people no longer have to spend weeks or months meeting new people in the real world. Finding friendship or something more can be achieved by adopting new modern solutions such as dating sites.

Naturally, many people believe that dating sites are only for love, but that’s strictly not the case. Dating platforms are designed to bring people together, and love isn’t the only thing you can find there. With the reach of dating sites spreading far and wide, it’s possible to find people who are looking for similar things—search profiles for like-minded men who enjoy travel and want companionship and then connect with them. Sharing your passion for travel can heighten the experience for both people, and that makes your journey more exciting, engaging, and rewarding.

It’s possible to explore several countries and several friends at the same time, deciding which person is likely to be more suited to you and your trip. Speaking with people online will enable you to learn all about them, find out more about their character, and discover what they’re looking for. It’s easier than meeting people in person because it enables you to ask the right questions and even carry out research on them online.

Plan Your Trip With Them

Whether you’re someone eager to spend time living it up on the golden beaches of Thailand or you’re someone who wants to travel through India to discover different cultures, it’s important to plan the trip with precision.

With your travel partner in place, now it’s time to discover what you want to do and where you want to go. Having the opportunity to chat through plans and different places, it’s possible to create the trip of a lifetime. Share your desires, chat about different things you’d love to explore and the places you want to visit. Planning your itinerary together ensures everyone understands what to expect while the vacation becomes tailored to both people.

Perhaps you’re focusing on one country or several countries; an itinerary will guarantee the trip becomes a perfect experience for everyone. Once you’ve agreed on it, you’ll then be able to book the vacation online, searching for the best deals, the cheapest flights, and the best accommodation. Now it’s time to decide – two beds… or one?

Enjoy the Trip and Make it One to Remember

With every plan in place and your itinerary ready, it’s important to remember to enjoy every second. The trip has taken meticulous planning, it’s involved finding a companion, and it’s required both to agree on an itinerary. Therefore, the final thing to do is to enjoy it.

Any vacation and trip with someone can come with concerns, but the aim is for both to enjoy it. Remember, spending large amounts of time together brings challenges, so be prepared to accept decisions and choices that move away from your itinerary. Whether it’s choosing restaurants or making many other decisions, including dealing with the tension that will undoubtedly arise, the aim is to ensure you make it the best summer of your life.

It’s easier than many realize, although it takes an open mind and understanding to agree and get on well. Once you both understand each other and recognize the significance of the trip, you’ll make it one to remember for a lifetime.

The modern world has evolved, creating endless opportunities and possibilities for people who are ready to use all the tools and opportunities it offers. No longer are guys restricted by old approaches to meeting partners. As the Internet brings people together, it allows us to create new relationships and friendships. Meeting like-minded people and sharing experiences together makes both travels and websites the ideal place to connect.

They are also tied by the scope to connect with endless people and learn about them – it speeds up the process of accepting the world as a whole and your partner as someone you want to be by your side, even if it started as a friendship. So, seeking a travel companion shouldn’t be a challenging experience. In fact, it’s one to embrace and enjoy because it brings with it plenty of new adventures.

This week read about a hairstylist named Mykey O’Halloran receiving death threats for painting his home to the colors of the rainbow, and HIV drugs becoming scarce and causing lives to be at risk in Kenya.

Gay Man Threatened For Painting His Home Like A Rainbow

Hairstylist Mykey O’Halloran wanted to do something distinctive to his beige home after saving enough money to buy one on Phillips Island in Australia, so he went for rainbow colors, much to the chagrin of several of his new neighbors.

O’Halloran is the proud owner of Unicorn Manes, a salon that specializes in rainbow-like hair designs, so he thought it fitting that his house would reflect his work and himself.

“I had five men aggressively banging the front door, one threatening to kill me if I paint my house rainbow and calling me homophobic things like ‘you gay c***,’” O’Halloran recalled to Daily News.

Daily News reports that a fundraiser for O’Halloran raised nearly $8,000 that would benefit the Phillip Island Community and Learning Centre that is a non-profit that provides services to members of all ages.

HIV Drugs Run Short in Kenya as People Say Lives are at Risk

Photo via Facebook.

Kenyans infected with HIV complain their lives are in danger as a result of a lack of antiretroviral medications donated by the U.S. due to a disagreement between the U.S. relief agency and the Kenyan government.

According to AP News, the delayed arrival of drugs sent to Kenya late last year is due to the government slapping an $847,902 tax on the donation and the U.S. aid agency having “confidence” issues with the graft-tainted Kenya Medical Supplies Authority.

“We are assuring the nation that no patient is going to miss drugs. We have adequate stocks,” Kenya Medical Supplies Authority customer service manager Geoffrey Mwagwi said to AP News. According to Mwagwi, those drugs would cover two months.

By far the U.S. is the biggest donor to Kenya’s HIV response.

A growing body of research has in recent years shown that companies promoting gender and racial diversity tend to perform better financially, but fresh analysis out of Finland now provides evidence that the same is true of companies championing LGBT-friendly policies. 

Academics at two universities in the Nordic country assessed the financial performance of 657 publicly-traded U.S. companies between 2003 and 2016, and found that firms with LGBT-friendly policies tend to enjoy both higher profitability and higher stock market valuations.

For the purposes of the survey, LGBT friendliness was determined based on the Corporate Equality Index constructed by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT civil rights advocacy organization in the U.S. HRC has published the index for large U.S. firms annually since 2002.

In recent years, some of the U.S.’s best-known and largest companies, including Apple, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, Google, Hewlett-Packard and Walt Disney, have all publicly pledged their support for sexual minorities, earnings them top ratings in HRC’s Corporate Equality Index. But corporate social advocacy can, as the researchers acknowledge in presenting their research, be “tricky business”.

“While taking a public stand on potentially sensitive social or political issues may lead to positive outcomes and competitive advantages, the repercussions of social advocacy can also be detrimental if the stance taken is not aligned with the preferences and values of the firm’s key stakeholders,” they write.

Against the backdrop of this, their research was motivated by a desire to determine whether the risk of alienating certain stakeholders by, for example, supporting same-sex marriage, outweighs the benefits of doing so. 

“Taken as a whole, our empirical findings provide strong evidence to suggest that LGBT-friendly corporate policies enhance firm performance,” they conclude. “These findings can be considered to support the view that socially progressive corporate policies and diversity management pay off and create value for the firm.”

The report should foment an already well-documented economic incentive for creating workplaces that proudly reflect the demographic makeup of the broader communities in which they operate.

In May last year, global consultancy McKinsey & Co published an extensive report based on analysis that found that in 2019, companies in the top quartile of gender diversity on executive teams were 25 percent more likely to experience above-average profitability than peer companies in the fourth quartile. That number was up from 21 percent in 2017 and 15 percent in 2014. 

In terms of ethnic and cultural diversity, McKinsey & Co’s conclusions were equally compelling. The consultancy found that companies in the top quartile outperformed those in the fourth by 36 percent in terms of profitability in 2019, marginally up from 33 percent in 2017 and 35 percent in 2014. 

One explanation for both these findings and the correlation determined by the Finnish researchers, is that employee retention and satisfaction tends to be higher in businesses where diversity is explicitly promoted, regardless of whether that relates to gender, race, sexuality or another identifying characteristic.

Greater retention tends to be a reasonable proxy for employee satisfaction, which is known to correlate with productivity and therefore financial performance. 

Likewise, a diverse workforce and management that promotes LGBT‐friendly policies may also improve competitiveness in the job market by fostering a company’s ability to attract, recruit and retain the most talented employees.

You: The two women from my past who I judged too quickly during a chance brunch encounter

Me: The dyke who apparently projected her own hangups about middle school onto you

It’s 2017, and I’m picking up a to-go order from the neighborhood Mexican spot for my girlfriend and I. Our usual order: a chicken milanesa torta to split. On the short walk back home, I’ll also pick up two iced lattes. At home, I’ll fry an egg for our sandwich. We’ll eat on the couch she’ll soon win in the breakup. Things haven’t erupted between us yet, but there are cracks in the foundation quietly spreading, and it’s making me cling a little obsessively to routines like a torta and iced lattes and eggs sputtering in oil. By which I mean, things aren’t always what they seem.

Here I go, rambling about myself, which really was the whole problem with this chance encounter. My self-absorption. So back to you two. As I wait at the host stand for my order, I see you sitting at a high top having brunch. Two smiling, lanky blondes with instantly familiar faces from my middle school years. We’re 348 miles from that middle school, and you both look exactly the same as then, and perhaps it’s the collision of those two truths that briefly knocks me out of time and space. I feel dizzy. I feel like something is wrong.

It’s all so dramatic and stupid, this way I’m so suddenly affected by seeing you both again. We weren’t even exceptionally close throughout middle school, though one of you was in my brief but intensely bonded sixth grade girl gang made exclusively of girls with K names. You also came to my birthday sleepover that year when I made everyone watch Singin’ In The Rain. It’s you who looks at me, and I hold your gaze for a moment. I feel like you don’t recognize me at all. Eventually, I won’t be able to trust any of my perception of this interaction, which let’s be real, isn’t even an interaction at all, because I never approach you. I never give either of you a chance to be known or to know me.

I convince myself you don’t recognize me in that split second we lock eyes. I think about all the ways I’ve changed. I look different. I feel different. I am different. This is what I’ll say to my mother when she admonishes me for being rude by not saying hello, though it isn’t much of an explanation for my behavior. A friend will also ask why I didn’t say hi given the small worldness of our encounter, and I will think I’ve arrived at some wise truth when I explain to her I don’t know how to interact with people who knew me before I came out. I will explain I have a bizarre compulsion to scream I’M GAY NOW when I do.

I take my food, sign the receipt, and step back out onto a sunny and bustling Saturday sidewalk. It would have been so easy to walk up to you both, to point to myself and say, it’s me, Kayla, remember me? To awkwardly reminisce. To talk about what brought us to right here right now. It could have smoothed over the time ripple that made me so disoriented. It could have made me actually see you instead of just spying on you and then bolting.

But because I didn’t stop to say hi, remember me?, I become lost in my own brain spiral. I feel unhinged when I try to explain the encounter to others. No, you don’t get it, I insist, it was so weird because they looked exactly the same, they were exactly the same. They’re still best friends—isn’t that weird?

None of this was fair to you. Why was I so freaked out by your sustained best friendship? There shouldn’t be anything wrong with lifelong friendship, with staying close to the people you grow up with, but I was judgemental. I foolishly conflated it with a lack of growth, of expansion. I’m not the same person I was when you knew me. Seeing you together after all these years, I assumed you were unchanged.

Worse, my middle school baggage burst to the surface when I saw you. You two suddenly became a representation of every blonde white girl who made me feel like an other in those years, even though most of the specific examples I can recall weren’t things either of you did or said but merely things done and said by girls in your orbits. Conflating them with you, making you complicit in something in my mind, all of it has everything to do with me and my issues and nothing to do with you. I’m sorry.

Maybe it would have been annoying for me to interrupt your brunch by saying hello, but I do regret it. I regret not approaching you, and I even regret not making my big awkward I’M GAY NOW declaration. Because it turns out I was wrong about so many things about you two. Almost everything actually. Because thanks to another chance encounter, this time on social media, I eventually found out you’re not best friends anymore. You’re girlfriends. In all my tunnel vision, I saw your intimate body language over brunch and assumed friendship when really you had fully been dating for years by that point. Not only did I misjudge—I misjudged FELLOW GAYS.

Me. Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. The person who famously thinks everyone is gay and has to often be reminded that heterosexuals do indeed exist. I’m the one who foisted this assumption upon you. I’m mortified by it. Who knows how things would have panned out if I hadn’t been such a hypocrite? Maybe we could have bonded over being closeted and queer at our Virginia public middle school where conformity was the law of the land. Maybe we had crushes on the same teachers. Maybe we could have formed an entirely new friendship that had nothing to do with the past. Or maybe I’m yet again offloading too much on you with these fantasies. Maybe it would have still been as simple as a brief and chance encounter, a little nod to the past, and then we all moved on.

Who knows what might have happened? But the fact that I didn’t allow for any of those possibilities was a mistake. I was so busy protecting myself from being known that I assumed I knew you, which couldn’t have been less true. The past doesn’t wholly define me, and it doesn’t wholly define you. I’m not the main fucking character of life, and I shouldn’t have acted like it.

I hope you two are happy. I hope you two sincerely don’t give a fuck what some selfish and short-sighted asshole you went to middle school thinks about anything. We all deserve to be at the helm of our own narratives, and I’m sorry I attempted to usurp yours.

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✨ @heyjaeee

Gaga: I’ll dance, dance, dance with my hands, hands, hands above my head, head, head like Jesus said Gays in 2011:

07:42 PM – 23 May 2021

A gay couple says that a man they didn’t know spat at them and called them “dirty homos” as they were walking and holding hands in public, so they ran up to him and confronted him.

“I was absolutely furious at what had happened,” Josh Barnett, 24, told Pink News. “I just could not believe it.”

Related: Man arrested for kidnapping & killing transgender teen after shootout with police

Barnett said that he was talking in the Wimbledon district of London earlier this month with his 21-year-old boyfriend Nathan in the middle of the day, when they heard “spit hit the floor.”

“We turned around to be faced with a man who, after spitting at us, proceeded to call us ‘dirty homos,’” Barnett said.

He pulled out his phone to confront the man.

“You were just spitting at us and calling us homos. You’re on camera,” Barnett can be heard saying in the video. The man made an obscene gesture in response.

Barnett said that the man then ran away.

He posted the footage he got to Twitter.

“Normally wouldn’t do this, but Nathan and I were walking through Wimbledon holding hands, when this guy spat on the floor just behind us and proceeded to call us ‘dirty homos’ & swear. It’s disgusting. We continued holding hands and are proud, but come on…in 2021?” he wrote in the tweet.

Barnett said the “support from the LGBTQ+ community has been overwhelming” in response to the video.

The police even encouraged him to file a report, which he did the next day. He said that Wimbledon Police took the incident seriously and he gave them the video, but they haven’t been able to identify the man yet.

He said that he is glad he stood up to the man, but explained that he only felt safe in doing so because it was the middle of the day and so many other people were around.

“I wanted to stand up to him and film him as calling out and exposing this sort of behavior is the only way people like him learn they cannot do that to someone, and it also shows others that it is still happening,” Barnett said.