Google on Friday, June 2, used its latest Doodle to celebrate American artist and gay rights activist Gilbert Baker, creator of the rainbow flag that has become a symbol of pride for LGBTQ individuals around the world.
Baker made his way from Kansas to San Francisco with the U.S. Army.
After leaving the military, Baker taught himself to sew and volunteered his skills to make protest banners for the city’s gay community.
~~GRAPHICS SOURCE~~
Google Images
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I do not own these images.
No intention of taking credit.
If anyone knows the owner of any, please advise and it will be corrected immediately.
In 1978, influential gay leader Harvey Milk challenged Baker to create a new symbol for activists to rally around. The most widely used icon at the time was the pink triangle, reclaimed from the symbol used during World War II to identify gay prisoners being held in Nazi concentration camps.
While it may have been a potent symbol of common suffering and struggle, Baker wanted to create something more positive and celebratory to bind the growing LGBT movement together.
The first rainbow flag Baker put together with volunteers in the attic of the Gay Community Center included eight differently colored horizontal stripes with their own meaning. After Milk’s assassination later that year, demand for the flag exploded and the limited availability of some fabric meant reducing the number of stripes to today’s six.
The Search Engine Google is showing this Animated Doodle in few countries for the Gilbert Baker’s 66th Birthday Gilbert Baker was an American artist and gay rights activist who designed the rainbow flag in 1978 Baker served in the United States Army from 1970 to 1972. He was stationed in San Francisco at the beginning of the gay rights movement. After his honorable discharge from the military, he taught himself to sew.
In Time of Critical Need for LGBTQ Americans, “Give OUT Day” 2017 is today
San Francisco, CA, April 19, 2017
(GLOBE NEWSWIRE)
LGBTQ Americans are in a state of urgent need: an administration actively hostile to the community now occupies the White House; homophobic and transphobic hate crimes have spiked following the election; over 130 laws attacking LGBTQ rights are pending in state legislatures around the country; and the one-year anniversary of the horrific Pulse shooting in Orlando is fast approaching. In this difficult climate, Give OUT Day, a national day of giving for the LGBTQ community, will once again coordinate a 24-hour online fundraising event to support over 300 LGBTQ organizations across all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.
Give OUT Day 2017 will take place on April 20, 2017 from 12:00 am to 11:59 pm Eastern. Last year, Give Out Day raised over $550,000.
Throughout the day-long event, thousands of people make gifts to support a diverse array of LGBTQ nonprofits, ranging from the arts to social services agencies, advocacy groups to sports leagues, and community centers to health care nonprofits.
Give OUT Dayis a project of Horizons Foundation.
Founded as a community foundation of, by, and for LGBTQ people, Horizons has been supporting LGBTQ nonprofit organizations, leaders, and donors for more than 35 years.
I find it very interesting how, when any event takes place, I like to go back and look for the history behind it.
Why did the event take place?
Colin Kaepernick’s statement is such a situation for me.
I’m not a football fan. I’d never heard of Kaepernick.
I sure know about him now!
I have been following the stories about excessive force in law enforcement events since Trayvon Martin’s death. It really came to my full attention with Michael Brown’s death.
Since then, I’ve been up on follow up events, situations and details.
I followed Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile … many more in between and many after.
I consider myself to be a fair, balanced individual.
There’s no doubt in my mind that these are instances of excessive police force.
Rather than de-escalation, it’s escalation.
It’s more prevalent within the African-American population.
This is the message that Keapernick is trying to bring to the forefront.
Seems to me he’s done a good job at calling attention to this matter.
The Forgotten Verses of “The Star-Spangled Banner”
Do you know all the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner”?
Many people have difficulty memorizing the lyrics of the first verse of this song, which is commonly performed at sports events and other public gatherings. But did you know that there are three additional verses that we almost never hear?
In 1814, the poet and lyricist Francis Scott Key penned the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” originally known as “Defense of Fort M’Henry.” During the War of 1812, Key witnessed the attacks on Baltimore and wrote the words based on his experiences this night. These lyrics were printed in local newspapers and set to the tune of an existing song called “Anacreon in Heaven,” and then officially arranged by John Philip Sousa. Key’s famous lyrics entered the world as a broadside ballad, or a song written on a topical subject, and printed for wide distribution.
More than a century later, in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed an executive order designating “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the national anthem, and in 1931, the US Congress confirmed the decision. The tune has kicked off ceremonies of national importance and athletic events ever since.
While the first verse of “The Star-Spangled Banner” is widely known by the American public, the last three verses are generally omitted in performances.
Naked Donald Trump Statues Populate American Cities
Nate Hopper
An anarchist collective distributed the life-size likenesses in very public locations
In New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Cleveland, life-size statues of Donald Trump in the nude stand in public. They were placed there by the anarchist collective Indecline, which among other projects has also glued the names of black men killed by police officers onto blank stars in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The Trump project is titled after a genital omission each statue shares, “The Emperor Has No Balls.” It’s an escalation of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 parable about a ruler so overconfident that he believes he’s wearing the world’s finest clothes, even when parading in the nude through his realm, beneath “his splendid canopy” — until a child breaks his delusion.
The artist who constructed the statues goes by the name Ginger and is a regular keynote speaker at haunted house conventions.
He told the Washington Post,
“When the Indecline organization approached me, it was all because of my monster-making abilities.”
According to the Post, he spent 25 hours weekly since receiving the commission in April, and worked through 300 pounds of clay and silicone, to construct the statues.
“IOTD” is image of the day, a concept I came up with. I teach visual meditative therapy – or in easy terms – a mini mental holiday. For some people it is very difficult for them to get their image right. I post an image a day for people to use in their mini mental vacay. Some are serious, some are silly, and some are just beautiful!”’
It seems that I can’t get this topic off my mind. It’s been circulating in many major news outlets. There has been a huge outcry about this action taken by the Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence. It has become the law of their state.
This is poised to affect the rights of the LGBTQ community living in the state.
One wonders where it will all stop. Who will be the next minority affected: Jews, Latinos, African American?
Arkansas is preparing to take action and also make this the law of their state.
Where will it stop?
After much progress has been attained where 37 states have declared acceptance of marriage equality and 13 states are left to have nationwide marriage equality, Indiana is the first state to make it legal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, Pub. L. No. 103-141, 107 Stat. 1488 (November 16, 1993), codified at 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb through 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb-4 (also known as RFRA), is a 1993 United States federal law aimed at preventing laws that substantially burden a person’s free exercise of religion.
The bill was introduced by Congressman Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on March 11, 1993 and passed by a unanimous U.S. House and a near unanimous U.S. Senate with three dissenting votes and was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
On Thursday, March 26, 2015, Indiana governor Mike Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) into law, and some celebrities, politicians, and journalists — including Miley Cyrus, Ashton Kutcher, and Hillary Clinton, just to name a few — are absolutely outraged. They say the law is a license to discriminate against gay people.
Meanwhile, activists are calling for a boycott. The CEO of SalesForce, a company that does business in China, is pulling out of Indiana. The NCAA has expressed concern about holding events there in the future. And the city of San Francisco is banning taxpayer-funded travel to the state.
This law has the distinction of making Indiana the first state to move overtly, wholesale, on purpose to legalize and say the state approves of businesses refusing to service people on the basis of sexual orientation …. or anything else your religion encourages you to discriminate on the basis of.
He is widely considered by commentators, critics, media and other martial artists to be one of the most influential martial artists of all time, and a pop culture icon of the 20th century. He is often credited with helping to change the way Asians were presented in American films.
Lee was born in Chinatown, San Francisco on 27 November 1940 to parents from Hong Kong and was raised in Kowloon with his family until his late teens. He was introduced to the film industry by his father and appeared in several films as a child actor. Lee moved to the United States at the age of 18 to receive his higher education, at the University of Washington, and it was during this time that he began teaching martial arts.
His Hong Kong and Hollywood-produced films elevated the traditional Hong Kong martial arts film to a new level of popularity and acclaim, sparking a surge of interest in Chinese martial arts in the West in the 1970s. The direction and tone of his films changed and influenced martial arts and martial arts films in Hong Kong and the rest of the world.
He is noted for his roles in five feature-length films: Lo Wei‘s The Big Boss (1971) and Fist of Fury (1972); Way of the Dragon (1972), directed and written by Lee; Warner Brothers‘ Enter the Dragon (1973) and The Game of Death (1973), both directed by Robert Clouse.[10] Lee became an iconic figure known throughout the world, particularly among the Chinese, as he portrayed Chinese nationalism in his films. He initially trained in Wing Chun and Boxing, but later rejected well-defined martial art styles, favoring instead the use of techniques from various sources, in the spirit of his personal martial arts philosophy, which he dubbed Jeet Kune Do (The Way of the Intercepting Fist). Lee held dual nationality of Hong Kong and the United States.
He died in Kowloon Tong on 20 July 1973 at the age of 32.
To commemorate an anniversary of Bruce Lee’s death on July 20th 1973,http://www.WatchMojo.com has decided to honor the icon by counting down the top 10 Bruce Lee moments.
Loren Rex Cameron (born 1959) is an Americanphotographer, author and transsexualactivist. His work includes portraiture and self-portraiture which consist of lesbian and transsexual bodies in both clothed and nude form.
Cameron’s photography captures images of the transsexual body that “provide an affirming visual resource for transgendered people and to demystify the transsexual body for the non-transgendered viewer.”
From the age of 16, Cameron was sexually and socially identifying as a lesbian. It was in 1987 that Cameron began his transition from female to male. He began his photography career in 1993 as he documented his process of becoming a man. As Cameron began to take pictures of his own transformation, he began to photograph other transsexuals.
His work includes portraiture and self-portraiture which consist of lesbian and transsexual bodies. Heralded as groundbreaking and stunning, his book Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits has been regarded as a seminal contribution. It has been critically acclaimed worldwide and in 1996 received numerous certificates of recognition, including two Lambda Literary awards.
~~Biography~~
Loren Rex Cameron was born in Pasadena, California in 1959. He moved to rural Arkansas in 1969 after his mother’s death, where he lived as a self-described tomboy on his father’s farm. By the age of sixteen, Cameron identified both sexually and socially as a lesbian and encountered homophobic hostility in the small town where he lived. At this time, Cameron quit school and left his home to travel the country seeking work as a construction laborer and other blue collar employment.
In 1979, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where he identified socially with the lesbian community until the age of twenty-six, when he confronted his dissatisfaction with the female body with which he was born.
Cameron’s interest in photography coincided with the beginning of his physical changes as he documented his own physiological transition from female to male at this time. Despite his lack of formal training, beginning in 1993 Cameron studied the rudiments of photography and began to compassionately photograph the transsexual community.
Since 1994, he has given lectures on his work at universities, educational conferences and art institutes.
By 1995, Cameron’s photographs had been shown in solo exhibitions in San Francisco, Minneapolis, a Los Angeles.
~~Works~~
Loren Rex Cameron’s photography and writing was first published by Cleis Press in 1996. Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits, documented Cameron’s personal experience of transition from female to male, his life as a man, and the everyday lives of transmen he knew. Body Alchemy was received with much positive acclaim and became a double 1996 Lambda Literary Award winner. It remains his most well-known work to date, though he has since published other photographic works.
His first published works (Body Alchemy and Man Tool: The Nuts and Bolts of Female-to-Male Surgery) consists largely of self-portraits, FTM body modifications, and portraits of other female to male transsexuals. More recently published work is a diverse and unprecedented representation of both female and male transsexuals, portraits and classical nudes (Body Photographs by Loren Cameron Volume 1 and 2, and Cameron Correspondence 1997-2003, Taller Experimental Cuerpos Pintados 2003).
A photographic project focuses on the sexuality of gay FTMs.
Lambda Literary Award Nominee, Best Photography Category, 1997
Inaugural Pride Award FTM Intl., 1997
Lambda Literary Award, 1996
~~Quote~~
“What was initially a crude documentation of my own personal journey quickly evolved into an impassioned mission. Impulsively, I began to photograph other transsexuals that I knew, feeling compelled to make images of their emotional and physical triumphs. I was fueled by my need to be validated and wanted, in turn, to validate them. I wanted the world to see us, I mean, really see us.”
BODY ALCHEMY: TRANSSEXUAL PORTRAITS
Photographs by Loren Cameron
From it’s striking cover, Body Alchemy grabs you and won’t let go until you’ve delved into the mysteries revealed by beautiful photographs and succinct text presented in a tastefully artful setting. This is, quite simply, a gorgeous book, on a subject so unconventional it boggles the mind. Caught within it’s pages, held lovingly and presented honestly, without undue trappings, are the boldest of a new generation of transsexual men. These are people born into “female” bodies, who are living as men at least some of the time, and changing their bodies to suit their desires. Just as bodybuilders sculpt their bodies to fit their personal aesthetic, so too do transsexuals mold their bodies around an ideal, though for these folks the ideal is not about muscle or fitness, but rather gender.Photographer Loren Cameron also serves as a subject for about one third of the book. He is obviously a man who works out, and his body as photographed is about as pleasing as I can imagine, for that of a man. His animal-like tattoos create an effect like that of a caged beast, virile and potent. On the cover, he is posed in what I took at first to be a “muscle man” pose, but which, on closer inspection, turned out to be a shot of him injecting himself with a syringe in the upper buttock. What at first appeared a pose, becomes instead a riveting testimony to both suffering and strength. It also establishes a level of tension that heightens the subject matter.Loren makes a fascinating subject. In some of the shots he seems fierce, projecting determination and anger. He admits to the anger that rises so easily as a result of the testosterone injections, of more frequent fights, of the struggle to contain the beast within. He writes engagingly of his relationships and feelings, and left me wanting more. He avoids self-indulgence, instead showing the many faces of a whole, healthy person.
Full read/Full Credit for this section: http://www.gendertalk.com/articles/oped/bodyalch.shtml
~~Loren Rex Cameron is not the only one~~
This is a reality which occurs more frequently that we think. It may be now that is discussed as openly as you see here.
Still the stigma of this “condition” continues unabated.
Here is a video and list of world famous men who were born female.
~~World Famous Men, who were born as female~~
~~Published on Oct 2, 2012~~
~World Famous Men who born as female~
~~Balian Buschbaum~~
Balian Buschbaum was born in 1980 as Yvonne Buschbaum, and he is a former German pole vaulter. Though he was the second best female pole vaulter in Germany, in 2007 Buschbaum announced his retirement due to a persistent injury. He also expressed his desire to begin gender reassignment therapy. In 2008 he officially changed his name and underwent gender reassignment surgery to become a man.
~~Buck Angel~~
Adult film maker and transsexual Buck Angel is an icon in the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) community. Buck was the 2007 winner of the Adult Video News Award “Transsexual Performer of the Year”. He currently works as an advocate, educator, lecturer and writer, and runs his own production company.
~~Loren Cameron~~
Loren Rex Cameron is an American photographer, author and transsexual activist. His work includes portraiture and self-portraiture which consist of lesbian and transsexual bodies; he documented his own physiological transition from female to male. Cameron’s photography captures images of the transsexual body that “provide an affirming visual resource for transgendered people and to demystify the transsexual body for the non-transgendered viewer.”
~~Ian Harvie~~
American Ian Harvie is a stand-up comedian who often uses his transsexuality as material in his act. He has performed with Margaret Cho and many other notable celebrities and is a well-known fixture in the LGBT pop culture community
~~Lucas Silveira~~
Born in Canada in 1979, Lucas Silveira made history being the first openly-trans man to be in a rock band which was signed by a major record label. Silveira is a vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter for The Cliks, he has also released a new solo album which is available now.
~~Katastrophe~~
Rocco Kayiatos is known as Katastrophe, an American hip-hop rapper and producer. Kayiatos is widely credited as the first openly transgender singer in the hip-hop genre.
~~Thomas Beatie~~
Thomas Beatie gained international attention for being the one of the world’s most visible “pregnant” men. Born female, Beatie lived his life as a woman until his mid-twenties. He then began taking male hormone therapy but decided to retain his female sex organs so that he and his wife, who could not conceive herself, could have children together using donor sperm. Beatie has since had three children and is back on his male hormones.
~~Ryan Sallans~~
Ryan Sallans was born as Kimberly Ann Sallans, and he is now a LGBT rights advocate and public speaker who travels the U.S. to educate people about transgender issues and changes to the health care system. He underwent his transformation from female to male over the course of several years and completed his transition in 2005. Sallans has been featured on “Larry King Live!” and the LOGO channel, as well as countless magazines and other publications.
~~Andreas Krieger~~
Andreas Krieger was a German shot putter who competed as a woman on the East German athletics team. From his early teens he was given anabolic steroids without his knowledge, which lead him to become more and more masculine in appearance and attitude. Krieger retired from the sport in 1990 and underwent sex reassignment surgery in 1997, and he has publicly said that he wishes he hadn’t been drugged so that he could have discovered for himself what his gender preference was
~~Chaz Bono~~
Chaz Bono was born Chastity Bono, the daughter of famous American performers Sonny and Cher. Raised in the public eye, Chastity came out as a lesbian when she was 25 before realizing that she was actually a transgender. Chaz underwent a sex change operation over the course of two years and is now happily living his life as a man. Chaz went on to be a contestant on the hit television show, Dancing With The Stars.
It Is What It Is 