LGBTQ Breaking News Service

“I would venture to say that the public were disgusted and outraged,” says author Crystal Jeans. She points to the response to the watershed lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall in the 1920s as just one famous example of the way authors have caused hysteria simply by acknowledging queer lives. Despite the book containing just two very mildly suggestive sexual references, “everyone went berserk and it was banned”, she says.

Stephen Hornby, national playwright-in-residence for the UK’s LGBT History Month, argues that our stories have long been actively suppressed. “The only interest used to be in censoring or denying any queer elements of the records of the past. So, things were kept from public display, passages were omitted from books and sexual relationships were presented as passionate friendships. That was wilful and deliberate distortion.”

But now society is becoming much more welcoming of queer people, there’s a huge appetite to hear our stories. And there are so many amazing stories to tell. 

The range of queer stories

On the one hand, there are the tales of famous figures like Greta Garbo, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Marlene Dietrich, Tchaikovsky, Josephine Baker and Hans Christian Andersen, all of whom experienced same-sex desire or engaged in same-sex activity in societies that didn’t welcome it, often channelling their frustrations into creating remarkable work that went on, in some cases, to determine the course of Western culture. On the other hand are the invisible stories of the millions of everyday men and women whose lives made less of a mark but included events as dramatic as familial rejection, professional dismissal, social exclusion, blackmail, criminal conviction, imprisonment, torture, electric shock therapy, chemical castration, and execution.

Arguably, even the most ordinary queer person of a certain age has lived an extraordinary life. And, when you consider the impact that the challenges they faced must have had on their emotions and relationships, you have the ingredients for gripping, moving, rousing drama – and characters that modern-day audiences are now ready to root for.

If you were around in ’70s Gay Atlanta, you’d likely know all about Diamond Lil.

The famed drag queen moved to Atlanta in the ’60s and found a living performing at Mrs. P’s on Ponce de Leon. Known as “Queen of the Jukeboxes,” her iconic performances were legend.

It was a different time for Atlanta’s LGBT population, says Atlanta journalist and author Martin Padgett. Depending on whom you ask, the period represented the city’s gay heyday, albeit one full of struggle for visibility and political agency.

In his new book, “A Night At The Sweet Gum Head,” Padgett details the struggle and celebrates the victories. The backdrop? One of the region’s first gay drag bars, The Sweet Gum Head on Cheshire Bridge Road.

“It developed very quickly into a hub of gay nightlife, and then later on, it developed another identity as a center of gay political awareness,” Padgett told WABE’s “All Things Considered” host Jim Burress.

Padgett started by talking about why he chose that Atlanta nightclub venue as the backdrop.

The LGBT Center of Greater Reading will host a COVID-19 vaccine clinic Friday in partnership with Latino Connection.

The event in Reading’s Centre Park is part of the center’s celebration of Pride Month.

“We have a month full of events, services and programs that we are excited to be hosting,” Michelle Dech, executive director of the center, said in a news release.

The free clinic will take place from 4 to 8 p.m. in a festival atmosphere that includes a DJ, music, food vendors and exhibits by community organizations.

Registration is optional, and walk-ins are welcome as long as vaccine supplies last. Participants will have the option of the two-shot Moderna vaccine or the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

Long before health equity was a research topic that drug companies discussed and long before mainstream HIV conferences or publications recognized the talents and solutions that Black same-gender-loving men could contribute to the HIV field, John L. Peterson, PhD, dedicated his career to it. He died earlier this year.

“A couple of weeks ago, a titan in the HIV research and prevention field left this earth,” HIV clinician, activist, writer and public health expert David Malebranche, MD, MPH, wrote on Twitter on June 8, following the publication of a Counter Narrative Project’s tribute to Peterson. “Anyone who does work with HIV and Black gay men should know his name and work.”

Indeed, it was 1988 when Peterson, a professor and later professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at Georgia State University, published an article in the American Psychological Association journal American Psychologist sounding the alarm that “ethnic minority men, particularly Blacks and Hispanics, make up a significant proportion of all AIDS cases in the United States”—but investment in HIV prevention research in those communities was not following suit. The article laid out a framework researchers could use when working with Black communities to quantify the disparities between Black same-gender-loving men and white gay men and to identify solutions.  

If it sounds outrageous that this work could have begun so early with so little heed paid to it, it should, Ace Robinson, MPH, a longtime public health leader, told POZ.

“We can be very clear that the work we’re doing now [addressing the needs of Black gay men] could have been done 30 years ago,” said Robinson, who started his career as a vaccine researcher and has since worked in HIV clinical trials and HIV prevention and care efforts through institutions including the University of California, Los Angeles and NMAC. He is also a steering committee member for the Prevention Access Campaign’s U=U campaign. Robinson currently serves as cochair of the Federal AIDS Policy Partnership, a coalition of more than 120 local, regional and national groups instituted as part of the federal government’s “Ending the HIV Epidemic” plan.

“We’ve known about HIV for 40 years. Someone just under 35 years ago gave us solutions,” Robinson said. “If we had reimagined the HIV response in the early days and had people like Dr. Peterson on the stage of the first AIDS conference, think of how many people would be alive today.”

Since that 1988 journal article, Peterson authored more than 45 studies that aimed to characterize and correct those inequities. His research ranged from the first random household probability sample of HIV risk behaviors among Black and white men in San Francisco to a study of Black and white gay and bisexual men recruited from bathhouses, sex shops and other community sites. The study showed that poverty and sex work were associated with the 50% increased risk of condomless sex for Black men compared with white men. And that was just in 1992. 

In 1996, Peterson was the lead author of a risk-reduction intervention for Black same-gender-loving men. He published a study on HIV testing among Black men the following year and served as coeditor of The Handbook of HIV Prevention in 2000. In more recent years, he published research about the barriers women living with HIV experiencewhen they look for social support, the ways in which homophobia did and did not explain the lack of access to care for Black same-gender-loving men compared with white gay men. Another study explained the different levels of HIV vulnerability among young Black gay and bisexual men.

Peterson counted among his coauthors Emory University’s Carlos del Rio, MD, and epidemiologist Patrick Sullivan, PhD; David Holtgrave, MD, dean of the school of public health at the University of Albany; Ron Stall, MD, cofounder of the Center for LGBT Health Research at the University of Pittsburgh; and Seth Kalichman, PhD, editor of the journal AIDS and Behavior.

Del Rio can remember phone calls with Peterson during which the pair discussed research topics, as well as those times when Peterson called him following a publication of del Rio’s data to “suggest things to consider for the next time.” And there was the time when Black clinic clients reported biased experiences with staff at del Rio’s clinic. Del Rio asked Peterson for help understanding the problem.

“He was a thoughtful advocate, thinker and challenger,” del Rio told POZ. “He tried to answer the tough questions. He didn’t stay in the superficial.”

Perhaps most importantly, though, Peterson guided and helped shape the careers of some of the HIV field’s most important Black researchers and clinicians. He mentored Gregorio Millett, MPH, a former epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and architect of the Obama-era HIV/AIDS Strategy who is now director of public policy at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. Together, the pair collaborated on Millett’s groundbreaking research on the inequitable impact of HIV on Black gay and bisexual men and inequitable access to HIV treatment, despite the fact that Black men got tested for HIV and used condoms more often than their white peers.

Peterson also mentored Malebranche and served as a coauthor on a study of how Black same-gender-loving men perceive medical culture and homophobia. Malebranche later went on to give a powerful plenary at AIDS 2018 on the ways in which the health care system fails Black gay men.

“Both David Malebranche and I considered John a father figure for whom we both owe our successful careers in science,” Millett told POZ.

This sentiment is echoed by the next generation of HIV researchers and activists as well. Robinson remembered meeting Peterson through Millett at an HIV conference years ago. At the time, Robinson was the director of the AIDS Prevention Unit at UCLA, working under Judith Currier, MD. Right away, Peterson asked him, “What are you going to do for us?”

By us, of course, said Robinson, Peterson meant the Black same-gender-loving communities Robinson was researching.

“That’s a very strong question to ask someone,” Robinson said. “I’m like 30 years old, I’m getting my footing and someone’s like, ‘With this role comes a level of responsibility. What are you going to do to support the most impacted communities with your work?’”

That changed Robinson’s thinking. He authored a conference paper in 2012 on pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for Black same-gender-loving men based on the foundational work Peterson had done. And he never forgot Peterson’s ethos that you don’t have to work harder if you do the right thing in the first place. Peterson was a believer in building new systems by and around the communities most impacted by HIV, not revising systems not built for them.

Daniel Driffin, MPH, a DrPH candidate and cofounder of THRIVE Support Services in Atlanta, concurred that Peterson did not mince words. But he was also the “speak softly and carry a big stick” type.

Still, he didn’t meet or know Peterson’s impact until Malebranche, Driffin’s own mentor, introduced the two at dinner one night. When Malebranche explained the work Peterson had done, Driffin told POZ he realized, “Oh my god, you’re the phoenix!”

“Especially when we think about many of the conversations that we still have today about ‘this community is a hard-to-reach community’—he proved that wrong 30 years ago,” Driffin said. “You hear about the amazing work he does, but he was the most humble guy, not in the limelight, just cranking out amazing research—and the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. He always had a smile and was willing to help out.”

Indeed, as Millett comes to terms with the hole Peterson’s death leaves in the HIV research community and in his own life, he said he knows that Peterson acted with integrity, guided by his own belief in doing community-based and community-supporting research.

“He made our community visible—so much so that research to address HIV among Black men who have sex with men has become common and mainstream over the past decade,” Millett said. “Although I lost a mentor, a colleague, a friend and a member of my family, John left so much behind with his research and inspired two generations of Black scientists. Because of John, Black (gay) lives matter. Because of John, my life and my work matters.”

Click here for more news about HIV and African Americans.

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) – The Stonewall Inn is probably the best known site when it comes to LGBTQ history and activism.  But there are hundreds of other touchpoints in this culture and history that have amazing stories behind them.

In buildings grand and non-descript, locations famous and private, there is rich LGBTQ history in just about every corner of New York City.

READ MORE: #TogetherInPride: Community Fighting To Make Sure LGBTQ+ Bars Survive COVID Pandemic

“We like to say that we’re making an invisible history visible,” said Andrew Dolkart, co-founder of the NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project.

“We have posted on our site over 350 sites, and we have a list with well over double that number that we would like to, to add,” Dolkart said.

Locations on the Historic Sites Project provide walking or armchair tours in the five boroughs. For example, on Staten Island, there is the Alice Austin House.

Web Extra: Extended Version Of Natalie Duddridge’s Report

“Alice Austin was a pioneering woman photographer… when it became a house museum, they refuse to acknowledge that there was any lesbian relationship,” Dolkart said.

Through the work of the Historic Sites Project, Austen’s sexuality is now embraced as part her cultural contributions. Some of her provocative images included women dressed in male drag. Austen lived in the home with Gertrude Tate, her partner of 53 years.

The West Side Tennis Club in Queens was the home of the US Open for over 60 years, featuring history-making players such as Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King .

“This is where Renee Richards, who was the first trans woman to compete in a professional tournament, tournament play, and this was very controversial as this still is today,” Dolkart said.

Other historic sites include the entire Theater District.

READ MORE: NYU Langone Workers Celebrate Pride Month On Long Island

“We have mentioned every single Broadway theater,” Dolkart said.

Dolkart says LGBTQ contributions are critical to all aspects of this business from the artistic to the technical.

There are dozens of historical residences to peruse too. St. Luke’s Place was home to famed director Aurthur Laurents. Playwright and gay activist Larry Kramer lived at 2 Fifth Avenue. Harlem Renaissance poet Lanston Hughes on East 127th street, and there’s the Lexington Avenue home of artist Andy Warhol. Literary icon James Baldwin’s rowhouse on West 71st street is listed on the national registry, as is the Bleecker Street home of playwright Lorraine Hansberry.

“It’s where she wrote A Raisin in the Sun, the first play on Broadway that was written by a Black woman, and the first play by a Black woman to win the New York Drama Circle Critics Award,” Dolkart said.

The Church of the Holy Apostles is also more than a noted New York City landmark.

“It has this really important social history that relates to the LGBT community, because it was the home of many of the earliest post-Stonewall activist organizations from 1969 to 1974,” Dolkart said.

Also relative to Stonewall was the Wooster Street firehouse, headquarters of the Gay Activists Alliance.

“In the early 1970s, they were involved in civil rights activism. They were involved in trying to end the entrapment of gay men and lesbians,” Dolkart siad.

The GAA moved out of that building in 1974, because of a fire, allegedly set by a homophobic arsonist.

That firehouse is also part of the SoHo-Cast Iron Historic District.

MORE NEWS: LGBTQ+ Mural Vandalized In Elizabeth, N.J., But Activists Say They Will Restore It To Symbolize Subject’s Resilience

For more information, CLICK HERE.

HIV diagnosis among overseas-born gay and bisexual men, especially those who have come to Australia from Asia, has increased from 28 per cent in 2008 to 52 per cent in 2017, according to the Australian Annual Surveillance report. Now, a new video campaign in Mandarin from ACON hopes to reach out to this vulnerable population to raise awareness about HIV prevention drug PrEP. 

The video features popular Taiwan-based social media influencers Fufu and Josh, better known on social media as ‘FJ234’ and sexual health expert Dr Stephane Wen Wei Ku in a trivia challenge about PrEP. 

Justin Xiao, Community Health Promotion officer with ACON, told Star Observer that the video, the first from the organisation in a language other that English, aims to meet the gap that was felt in existing HIV-prevention campaigns in Australia. 

According to Xiao, campaigns in the past have been from a “white, Western culture centric point of view” that perhaps failed to reach out to different cultural groups. 

That could be one of the reasons behind the data that shows that while HIV diagnosis has dropped dramatically in Australia in the past couple of years, “the rate has actually increased among overseas-born gay and bisexual men from Asia, and in particular, those from Mandarin-speaking backgrounds,” said Xiao. 

Language and Cultural Barriers

For many Asian gay men, language is not the only barrier to information about HIV and sexual health. As Xiao explained, there also exists cultural barriers when it comes to talking about sex. 

“Many Mandarin-speaking gay men don’t know about PrEP or they have heard about it but don’t believe it is right for them,” said Xiao. “We Chinese people tend to say you only take medication when you are actually sick, so to take something that is for prevention is somehow a new concept. Then, there is also a bit of stigma attached to PrEP.” 

In the video, Fufu and Josh address these aspects, explaining that PrEP is not only for the so-called high-risk population or those who are more sexually active or taking PrEP doesn’t mean “you are a slut”.

“In Asian cultures, many people are afraid of negotiating sex because they don’t want to feel embarrassed. PrEP is a good tool to  protect yourself even if you are not ready to talk about sex with your sex partner. We could all have a great sex life without  worrying about HIV,” Josh and Fufu said in a statement. 

The hesitancy around talking about sex is common in Asian cultures, said Xiao, and that is excaberated when it comes to sexual orientation and sexual health literacy. 

“I struggle with identity, a little bit,” said Xiao, adding, “Many people don’t know that they should get tested for sexually transmitted infections four times a year, many don’t know where to get tested or how HIV is transmitted”. 

Eliminating HIV in NSW

ACON is hoping the new campaign will play a significant role in briding the gap and raise awareness about PrEP among Mandarin-speaking gay communities in NSW. 

“Raising awareness of PrEP, which is an extremely effective strategy for preventing HIV transmission, is fundamental to our  efforts in eliminating the virus in NSW,” CEO Nicolas Parkhill said in a statement.

“We know that men in our communities from Mandarin-speaking Asian backgrounds continue to encounter barriers to  appropriate HIV prevention messaging, such as language and culture. This means that we must continue to employ new  strategies and initiatives to engage Mandarin-speaking Asian gay men about HIV prevention, including increasing awareness of  one of the most effective HIV prevention methods we have available – PrEP.” 

PrEP is available to Australians through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme since 2018. 

“Collaboration is key to improving awareness of PrEP, and we are extremely grateful to Fufu, Josh, Dr Ku and Hotline for taking part in our campaign. By working with them we hope the video will be able to help educate Mandarin speaking communities about a range of questions relating to PrEP, such as how effective it is, how easy it is to get, and different  ways that PrEP can be taken,” added Parkhill.