lgbtqi

Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio @ 8pm.

Il Trapezio Cafe/Gallery on 09/15/09

120 Franklin Ave., (near Harrison St.), Nutley, NJ 07110

973-661-1580.

Gaia and the New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet by Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, PhD

"A world where it is safe to live is a world where it is safe to love"

A Reading Hosted by Daniel P. Quinn, Producer Early-Bird Special includes book and standard order

Gaia and the New Politics of Love explains how to practice the arts of loving as a form of the arts of healing, which includes creating and sustaining amorous communities through shared amorous resources. Practicing the arts of loving activates the cycle of oxytocin in the human brain (the so-called "cuddling" hormone) that enables people to trust each other, display amorous behavior with one another, and cooperate in solving problems, thereby creating sustainability in their environments and communities. Through the practice of these new politics of loving we can transform hatred into love, fear into hope, and scarcity into abundance.

    PLEASE POST ON YOUR BLOGS, SITES, LISTS etc. Help us reach the folks we need.

    Many of you have already heard about our film, Baby Makes me. For you, this is an update. But for the folks who have not heard Tiona and I are making a documentary together.

    For years, I have wanted to become a mother. But the timing has never been quite right. Either my partners weren’t ready, or I was scared, or I couldn’t find a donor or something. There was always something. By the time I rolled into 35, I was tired of being afraid, tired of waiting for the right woman with whom it would be the right time, tired of watching every Christmas roll over another Birthday, tired of watching my peers get knocked up and months later appear with the most amazing little bundle of potential—I was tired of waiting and ready to make the leap, and I was ready to make it alone.

    I began the research with great heart—only to discover that there were little no resources for women who either wanted to, or had to embark on the journey of motherhood in the solo. There were one or two essays and a few books on artificial insemination, and some were even directed at lesbians—but most, if not all assumed that the mother would be operating from inside of a partnership, be that partnership heterosexual or homosexual.

National Equality March

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on July 9, 1868, and granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States. In addition, it forbids states from denying any person “life, liberty or property, without due process of law” or to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws.” By directly mentioning the role of the states, the 14th Amendment greatly expanded the protection of civil rights to all Americans and is cited in more litigation than any other amendment.

On October 10-11, 2009, we will gather in Washington, D.C. from all across America to let our elected leaders know that now is the time for full equal rights for LGBT people. We’ve had a moment thrust upon us by the election of President Barack Obama and the spirit of hope and change, and also by the sense of entitlement in the new generation of grassroots organizing. This march is a vehicle to a larger goal. We want to work to bridge the gap between the national organizations and the grassroots community organizers. We will gather. We will strategize. We will march. And we will leave energized and empowered to do the work that needs to be done in every community across the nation. This is only the beginning.

Our single demand: Equal protection in all matters governed by civil law in all 50 states.

Here is a wonderful, human and common sense example of why gay marriage should be legalized everywhere.  It is heartwarming and compassionate.

By Rami Abdelrahman(The Local)

As a human rights group publishes details of a bloody campaign of hate being waged against gays in Iraq, Rami Abdelrahman speaks to members of a recently founded initiative for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Arabs in Sweden.

Dressed in a flashy black belly-dancing outfit, Nancy is a hobby transgender dancer from Iraq, ready to take to the stage with full make-up and skinny high heels. She is preparing to entertain more than 200 other Arab gays, lesbians and transgender people in Stockholm, Sweden.

The setting is the Stockholm headquarters of the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights (RFSL). The occasion is the launch of Arab Initiative, the first Arab LGBT rights group in Europe.

Nancy has been in Sweden six years now. She lives with her Iraqi family in a Stockholm suburb and hides her preferred gender identity and hobby from her family.

“I was a hobby trans even back in Iraq. I believe most of my friends back then were bisexuals, they just refused to admit it, even if I had a relationship with them,” Nancy says, as she keeps watch of the entrance to the RFSL party premises.

She lets a fellow Iraqi in, and kisses him on both cheeks. Turning around, Nancy says her family would never accept her lifestyle and explains how she has to stay out with other Iraqi friends when she’s in town dressed up as the person she prefers to be.

“However, people here are more open to accepting a transgender belly dancer than in the Middle East.”

I received this call for writing, today.  I can't wait to read the finished volume.  So, dear readers, bloggers and community - if you have a story to tell, then you can get paid for it.  In the process, you will have the chance to point the way for the women who follow you.  All the better.

-arvan

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Call for Submissions
 
Working Title:  And Then It Shifted: Women Open Up About Leaving Men for Women (Seal Press, 2010)

2,000-4,000 words

Payment: Upon publication. Amount will vary, depending on experience and other variables ($50 and up). Please include a list of any previous publication credits with your query or submission. Contributors will also receive two copies of the published book.

Deadline: December 1, 2009. That said, we strongly encourage you to send us a query well beforehand, so that we can review it, give you helpful feedback, and have a good sense of what will be coming our way that month. If you are able to submit the piece earlier, we prefer that you do.

Editors: Candace Walsh and Laura André. Candace Walsh is the editor of the recently released anthology Ask Me About My Divorce: Women Open Up About Moving On (www.askmeaboutmydivorce.com).

As Dr. Lisa Diamond’s recent groundbreaking book Sexual Fluidity makes clear, women’s sexual desire and identity are capable of shifting. Cynthia Nixon, Carol Leifer, Wanda Sykes, Portia de Rossi, and countless others have left the fold of heterosexual identity to enter into or pursue same-sex relationships.

By Jonathan Alexander and Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

Will appear in Bisexuality and Queer Theory, a special-topics issue of The Journal of Bisexuality. Pre-published with permission of Routledge, New York.

Book Two: Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender. (Routledge, 2002)

By Clare Hemmings

Given such a sweep, Angelides’ text is well balanced by Clare Hemmings’ Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender, a text which is as every bit as theoretically savvy as Angelides’, but one which also provides nicely drawn portraits of actual communities in order to ground the theoretical consideration of bisexuality. Published just a year after A History of Bisexuality, Hemmings’ text examines bisexuality not just from the perspectives of the history of sexuality and queer theory but also from the analytics of cultural geography, which attends more to the lived experiences of bisexuals in specific locales. Such an approach offers her, ultimately, a somewhat more nuanced and sophisticated analysis of bisexuality.

Much like Angelides, Hemmings sees bisexuality as offering a theoretically rich way to interrogate and potentially destabilize the dominant hetero/homo binary:

…if we consider bisexual meaning in spatial terms, it becomes clear that bisexuality is not only a location between heterosexuality and homosexuality, binary genders or sexes, but also resides at the heart of lesbian community, between lesbian and gay communities, and in parallel with transsexuality within queer feminist terrain. As a result, a bisexual subject is capable of producing knowledge that is at odds with dominant and community formations of sexuality and gender, and for that reason alone is worth attending to. (196)

By Jonathan Alexander and Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

This post will appear in Bisexuality and Queer Theory, a special-topics issue of The Journal of Bisexuality, co-edited by Serena Anderlini and Jonathan Alexander. Pre-published with permission of Routledge, New York.

Steven Angelides, A History of Bisexuality. University of Chicago Press, 2001. 281 pages (with index)

Clare Hemmings, Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender. Routledge, 2002. 244 pages (with index)

Jennifer Baumgardner, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. 244 pages (with index)

Jenny Block, Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage. Seattle: Seal Press, 2009. 276 pages (with works consulted list)ⁱ

Beth Firestein, ed, Becoming Visible: Counseling Bisexuals Across the Lifespan. Columbia University Press, 2007. 441 pages (with index)

For this special issue of the Journal of Bisexuality on the intersections among queer theory and bisexuality, we thought it would be useful to review books that have substantively engaged this intersection in critical, insightful, and provocative ways.

Two such books, Steven Angelides’ A History of Bisexuality (2001) and Clare Hemmings’ Bisexual Spaces: A Geography of Sexuality and Gender (2002), are somewhat “older” texts that have not yet been reviewed in the pages of this journal. To correct that omission, and in recognition of the importance that these two studies play in so many of the articles in this special issue, we offer our review and thoughts here. To set the critical theory of these books in a more contemporary and applied context, we link them to three more recent text.

Two, Jennifer Baumgardner’s trade book, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics (2007), and Jenny Block’s Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage (2009) memorialize various levels of personal experience as avenues to theorizing bisexuality for the lay public, and observing the ways in which this trope deploys itself in one’s personal life and in the life and culture of our era. Finally, Beth Firestein’s edited volume Becoming Visible (2007) offers a store of applied research as well as theoretical knowledge directed to professional counselors and therapists who intend to provide bisexual patients with the mental and psychological health care they need. The volume’s subtitle, Counseling Bisexuals Across the Lifespan, is emblematic of the volume’s intent to dispel the myth that “bisexuality is a phase” one can overcome with “proper” medical attention. The idea here is that there are no reasons to “overcome” bisexuality, while there are many reasons why counselors and therapists, as well as society as a whole, should think of bisexuals as very healthy, wholesome, and valuable members of the human community.