LGBTQ Breaking News Service

Nothing was ordinary about Willie Gay Jr.’s rookie season in the NFL.

The 2020 second-round pick didn’t have organized team activities to prepare for the regular season because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

His training camp was abbreviated, and he had to try to learn Steve Spagnuolo’s defense on the fly.

Injuries in the regular-season finale and on the road to Super Bowl LV shelved him late in the year. Now, he feels fully healthy ahead of the start of mandatory minicamp Tuesday.

“All I do know is during this offseason period with this training staff, we’ve been working nonstop, me and (Chiefs assistant athletic trainer) Ms. Julie (Frymyer) and all her help that she has,” Gay told reporters Thursday. “It’s been a real grind and that’s why I’m here today, 100 percent.”

In the final game of the season, Gay suffered a high-ankle sprain. He later suffered a knee injury during build-up throughout the postseason, sidelining him for the Chiefs’ second-straight Super Bowl appearance.

“I don’t even know what really happened with it,” Gay said. “I tore my meniscus; I don’t even know if it was at practice or just walking around after.”

Six months later, Gay was a full participant throughout OTAs last week.

Now with a chance to find an expanded role in the linebacking corps, health and time are to his benefit this offseason.

“Of course it was tough for us that came in last year,” Gay said. “To only see the playbook for the first time during training camp, it was hard. To get that head start right now in OTAs and minicamp, it’s definitely helping a lot. I’m catching on to the things that I didn’t catch onto last year. I learned the basics. Now, it’s the small details that make good great. It’s coming along pretty good.”

Gay appeared in 16 games with eight starts last year, tallying 39 tackles, one sack, three passes defended and a forced fumble, playing on 25% of the teams snaps.

As part of his group, the Chiefs must replace Damien Wilson, though second-round pick Nick Bolton joins Gay, Anthony Hitchens and Ben Niemann as the team’s notable contributors.

With high expectations and a chance to compete for an immediate starting job, Gay is using the remainder of the offseason to build off last year’s strides.

“Really all I want to do is just my job,” Gay said. “Be able to be counted on and just do what I do to the best of my ability. Whether it’s tackling, whether it’s covering guys, blitzing, just continue to improve each and every day on the details of plays and execute every little detail that I do have with my assignments and all.”

Don Donnelly
Born : January 25th 1955
Died: May 19th 2021

Don Donnelly, who has died aged 66, played a key role in building supports for members of Ireland’s gay community at a time when they were largely unseen by the rest of society, and frequently living in fear.

Ultimately, his life’s work, along with the efforts of many others, transformed the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people and won for them a level of acceptance and equality that a generation hitherto seemed impossible.

A physically large man with an ebullient personality, he had the capacity to motivate others while also achieving, and maintaining, unity between disparate and sometimes fractious activist groups.

“He was a very good leader,” according to fellow campaigner Kieran Rose. “He inspired and we were encouraged by him. A marginalised community needs people they can follow. He was one such.”

Donnelly was born in Dublin in January 1955 and grew up in modest circumstances in Páirc Mhuire, a local authority housing scheme in Newbridge, Co Kildare. His parents, John and Rosealeen Donnelly, lived initially in what he later described as “one room in an old, damp house in a brownstone on the edge of the Curragh”.

With self-deprecating humour, he said that after Christy Moore and Donal Lunny, he was “the third most famous person in Newbridge… or infamous”.

Comparatively well off

Although poverty was widespread within the community around him as a child, he told Edmund Lynch, in a 2013 interview for an LGBT+ oral history project, that his family was comparatively well off.

“Poverty was partly not so much lack of work but it was not unusual, in a three-bedroomed council house, to [have] families of six, eight, 12 or 14 people because people had no concept at all of birth control… I was lucky [because my family] was just a family of three so we were relatively well off,” he said.

He was the eldest of three children. His father was a shift worker and his mother, who was plagued by ill-health, spent long and regular periods in hospital. Around the age of nine or 10, Donnelly said he began to feel that he was different but it was not until he was 12 or 13 that he was able to articulate what the difference was.

In his interview with Lynch, he said that while studying literature at school, the writers Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain helped clarify in his own mind matters of his sexuality to the point where he could come out to his parents.

“I was able to go to my father and tell him that I thought I was gay and that I was pretty sure it was the case,” he said in the interview. “He in turn asked me was I happy, relatively, or was I concerned? And I said no, ‘I am not concerned and I’m not worried.’ And he said fine, just remember, ‘don’t make all the boys cry.’ He was a very calm and relaxed man. And that was my father and the extent to which he would react. So whether his son was coming out to him, or the Korean war had just broken out, he wasn’t phased easily by anything.”

After attending the Patrician Secondary School in Newbridge he qualified as a chartered accountant. He worked variously as accounts and financial controller at Irish Ropes and Hanlon Foods, as well as in Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and Turkey.

Shop steward

In an unusual segue in later life, lean times saw him take a job as a cashier in Tesco in Newbridge, where he became shop steward in Mandate and was elected chairman of the Tesco European Works Council.

But his lasting achievements relate to his activism for gay rights.

In the 1980s when homosexuality remained criminalised, he set up Tel-a-Friend, a phone-based support for gay people, many of them frightened and dealing with their sexuality alone. At the time, publications would not take advertisements using the word “gay” or “homosexual”, so Donnelly and his associates made stickers which they put up in public telephone boxes.

In 1988, he was a founder, with Charles Kerrigan, Suzy Byrne, Kieran Rose and Christopher Robson, of Glen, the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network, a coalition that spearheaded the campaign for gay rights in Ireland.

The following year, he gave a breakthrough soapbox address on The Late Late Show, arguing on prime time television for gay rights.

In the 1989 general election he stood as a Glen candidate in the Dublin constituency of then taoiseach Charles Haughey. He received 141 first-preference votes, plus one transfer.

Despite this electoral rebuff, the campaign for gay rights had gained momentum and it led to an invitation to meet then president Mary Robinson in Áras an Uachtaráin, a not-insignificant sign of growing acceptance.

For all his innovating, Donnelly was a gradualist, supporting civil partnership ahead of full marriage equality for gay people.

“He felt that by changing things one little bit at a time, people would see that the sky had not fallen in,” says his husband Garreth O’Mahony. “You had to bring the people with you because they were frightened of change.”

“It was a very long, slow slog,” recalls long-time friend Jon Taaffe. “We were very gratified by the marriage equality referendum. We never thought we would see gay marriage in our lifetime. We thought civil union would be the height of it.

‘Extremely proud’

“He was extremely proud of what had been achieved… he achieved a great deal in making life much more bearable for a lot of lonely and isolated LGBT people.”

He was blessed by having accepting parents – so much so that they worked with the Irish branch of Parents Enquiry, a support group for parents of gay children. This involved them going to schools and community groups giving talks.

Donnelly died of a heart attack but for much of his life he coped with the highs and lows of bipolar disorder.

“He would have always mentioned that he was bipolar if he thought it could help someone,” says O’Mahony. “It’s a hidden disease and nobody wanted to talk about it, so he would. It was something that he had very much under control.”

Fond of GAA football, swimming, country walks and cinema, Donnelly was also an accomplished chef and host. At one stage, he ran a guest house, Dublin’s first openly gay guest house, and also embarked on an ultimately unsuccessful investment in a bar in Spain.

Friends remember Don Donnelly as a joyous man, whose company was treasured and who was the source of much laughter.

Predeceased by his father, he is survived by his husband Garreth, his mother Rosealeen, brother Aidan, sister Gaye, his wider family and in-laws, and a wide circle of friends.

FORMER Antrim camogie star Jane Adams feels the GAA is “moving in the right direction” – but believes more can still be done to support inclusion of the LGBT community within the association.

Adams admits she struggled to accept her sexuality during her playing days and, for all the strides that have been made in recent times, still sees barriers that have to be broken down over time.

“I don’t think there’s enough being done because when it is talked about, it’s still talked about as if it’s a taboo. But they are trying,” said the former Rossa ace, who led the west Belfast club to an All-Ireland senior title in 2008.

“This is Pride month, the GPA and the women’s GPA have changed their badge to a rainbow. Even those small things show that, slowly, we’re going in the right direction. It might not be where we want it to be right now, but it’s moving in the right direction.

“I know lots of girls and fellas within the GAA who are gay but whether or not they will ever come out is entirely up to them. All I can say to them is that, when you do, when you accept yourself, it’s so much easier and life is so much better.

“When I was younger I didn’t want to be talking about being gay, I didn’t want my team-mates to think it. Even now there are issues around the language used in connection with it, so there are still barriers to be broken down.

“Everybody should be looked at as equal. That is always how I have looked at life – I’ve never thought I was better than anybody else, I’ve never thought I’m any worse than anybody else.

“Gay, straight, whatever you are, nobody should be treated differently. But we’ll get there. We will move forward.”

Since the 1960s, queer Londoners have frequented Camden Town’s The Black Cap for drinks, drag nights, cabaret, and company.

In 2015, however, the club had to shut its doors over a planning dispute. The Black Cap’s future looked uncertain, until the Camden New Journal published a recent report about the club’s new ownership. Thanks to years of protests and regular vigils from London’s queer community, the Black Cap is en route to resurrection. 

A company known as Kicking Horse Three has taken over ownership of the Cap, as well as a few other historic bars in Belsize and Dartmouth. 

New owners of Black Cap pledge to help get famous LGBT+ bar open againhttps://t.co/qmi38mjsRV pic.twitter.com/iB6MifJJmb

— Camden New Journal (@NewJournal) June 10, 2021

 “We understand and value the historical and cultural importance of The Black Cap to Camden Town, and in particular, to the local LGBTQ+ community,” new owners Andy Merricks and Steve Billot told the Journal. “We are engaging directly with Camden Council, and look forward to further positive discussions as we work closely with officials and the local community.”

The Black Cap’s reopening is an auspicious sign for gay bars in the US and UK alike. When the pandemic hit last year, gay bars across the world faced a direct threat to their futures due to forced closure and an uncertain reopening timeline. Both the Save Our Spaces project and the documentary  The Lesbian Bar Project have drawn attention to the rapid disappearance of queer-designated historical spaces and bars in the wake of gentrification and COVID closures. It’s by no means a new problem—the fantastic 2006 documentary “Small Town Gay Bar” bemoans the fate of neighborhood gay bars doomed to close—but the pandemic has certainly sped things up and refocused the community’s attention on bars as safe spaces, as well as historical sites of queer history. The Black Cap’s reopening as a “pub, club, and cabaret” is a hopeful sign that historical properties can be collectively fought for and revived. The pub’s new owners told the Journal that the bar is needed “now more than ever.” 

Alex Green, from the Black Cap Foundation that’s been campaigning to save the bar for years, also shone some light on the bar’s closure in 2015. “It came at a time of lots of closures,” he told the Journal. “The Cap was somewhere people would gather not just to relax, to be able to be themselves without worry, but to mark occasions – birth, marriages, wakes. It has been iconic and important for decades. There are very few places where you can walk up, place your hands on the walls and say: this contains our history.”

History deserves to be protected, and gay bars are part of that. 

(WFSB) — All around the world, Pride Month is celebrated during the month of June.

This month, Eyewitness News is featuring stories about the gay community.

Connecticut’s Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce works to promote diversity throughout the state, year-round.

It all began in 2007.

“We are the only Chamber of Commerce that covers the state of CT. So, the other chambers will focus on the town or the city, but we cover it all,” said Executive Director John Pica-Sneeden. “It’s a plain Chamber of Commerce. If you know what the definition of the chamber of commerce is, it’s a networking, business organization.”

The organization is the voice of dozens of LGBTQ-owned businesses, providing opportunities and educational resources.

It also includes allies, those who support the gay community.

That’s where restaurant owner Chris Skabardonis comes in.

“We like to be part of all different kinds of organizations, but this is an especially good one for us. I think that you have to be inclusive and be on the right side of history and I believe it’s the right thing to do,” said Skabardonis, owner of Nutmeg Restaurant in East Windsor.

Events like “Pink Eggs and Glam,” a drag queen brunch, and “Prime Timers,” a senior organization for gay men, are held at the restaurant.

“We have all kind of different organizations that meet here, they’re good customers and frankly, it’s good business,” Skabardonis said.

Skabardonis has been a Chamber member for about seven years.

There are larger organizations that are also part of the Chamber.

“Foxwoods is a partner, Travelers is a partner, HSB is a partner, the Connecticut Voice Magazine, so we have many, the American Cancer Society. And then we go from these big corporations to the tiniest, little massage therapist,” Pica-Sneeden said.

It doesn’t matter who joins, it’s open to everyone.

The local group is affiliated with the national Gay and Lesbian Chamber.

For more information, click here.