Outfest: Pride And Prejudice

Before I discuss Outfest itself, here are a couple of pictures I took on Wednesday when the Rainbow Flag was raised at City Hall in honor of LGBT History Month. I hadn't realized that the flagpoles in question were sitting at ground level and didn't go extremely far up. Still, it's a nice honor. I did read that the flag was only raised temporarily, and then taken down until the 15th because they had to put back up the Puerto Rican flag that was raised in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month (mid-September to mid-October). That seems to be a slight to both, in a way. Perhaps they'll work things out differently next year.

The Rainbow Flag after being raised

Mayor Michael Nutter speaking

As for Sunday, when I got downtown and walked down 13th Street towards the festival, the first thing I saw was the protesters. There's a small group of religious nuts that shows up every year at the Pride festival in June, as well as at Outfest. The reactions to these protesters ranges from trying to reason with them (complete waste of time) to heckling to making jokes to angry yelling. There's always a police presence to keep the peace, which is a good thing because if there weren't, I know there'd be trouble.

This year, in addition to the small group standing near the barricade with the loudspeaker blaring their message of hate, there were a few people walking around the festival with t-shirts saying "God hates you" and "God hates sinners" -- sort of like what the Westboro Baptist creeps wear, but none of them actually said "God hates fags," as the Phelps nuts wear. Also, their sayings were either written in pen or painted. They were quite crudely written. I guess those people were too poor to afford anything better.

Meanwhile, I almost literally walked into a film crew walking backwards. I had no idea who they were filming until I looked at one of their credentials.

Message For LGBT Youth: It Gets Better

In response to a suicide by a gay teenager from Indiana who hung himself after relentless bullying at his high school, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage has started a YouTube page, the It Gets Better project. He explains the page in his column:

"My heart breaks for the pain and torment you went through, Billy Lucas," a reader wrote after I posted about Billy Lucas to my blog. "I wish I could have told you that things get better."

I had the same reaction: I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

His idea: having adults make a video in which they talk about how they survived growing up despite abuse and hate and bullying, and now are living wonderful lives, passing on the message that no matter how bad things are, they'll get better. Dan and his husband filmed the first one. Watch it after the jump...

From Protest To Party

Last night the Temple University Student Government and their Queer Student Union put on a production of "The Laramie Project" on campus. In case you aren't aware, it tells the story of the reactions of people in Laramie, Wyoming to the 1998 torture and murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student.

This did not please the Westboro Baptist Church, the extremist anti-gay organization led by Fred Phelps that holds protests at funerals of fallen soldiers and many other events, waving signs such as "God hates fags" and "Thank God for 9/11." The cult (let's face it, that's what they are) announced that they would hold a protest at Temple because of the production of "The Laramie Project" as well as a separate production of "Rent." A counter-protest was organized in response.

My friend Kurt (with whom I share a birthday, albeit 20 years apart) was in the cast of "The Laramie Project" so I went to see him in the first of two shows, at 4 pm, as did his friend Stacy from Virginia, and we then joined the counter-protest. The amount of people -- mostly students, but not entirely, and not all from Temple -- was impressive. The turnout was reported at over 1,100 at the locations where the two plays were being held, according to the report in the Temple News. (Neither the Inquirer nor the Daily News saw fit to cover this story, unfortunately.)