Singer/choreographer Bobby Newberry recently dropped his stylish, sexy new music video, “Lit.”
And, trust and believe, the video lives up to its title.
The club-friendly track teams Newberry with sexy AF Brazilian rapper Aleff for the track and video who drops his raps in Portuguese. You’ll also spot RuPaul’s Drag Race alum Laganja Estranj working it out in the mix.
Fashion designer Jeremy Scott also brings his own brand of sexy/smooth to the video via clothing from his luxury fashion house, Moschino.
”I wrote the song about when you meet someone and have that instant, undeniable attraction and connection,” Newberry recently told OUT. “They give you that rush that’s almost intoxicating, like taking drugs but you’re high on the person. Like butterflies in the stomach, they got you feeling lit.”
Newberry shares that he’s been writing and recording for seven years now and knew when the time came, he would want to be an artist who’s true to himself.
“I made the decision to be open and talk about guys in my songs and be openly gay because I want to always be an authentic artist, be real,” he recently told HuffPost’s Curtis Wong. “And also to inspire up-and-coming artists so they can do whatever they want and be their authentic selves as well.”
Newberry’s also sporting some serious body. Check out below from his Instagram.
It was one year ago today that Donald Trump tweeted his intention to ban transgender people from serving in the U.S. armed forces.
Now, the Trump administration seems to be turning his attention to HIV positive service members.
A February 14 Department of Defense memo announced a new “Deploy or Get Out!” policy which goes into effect on October 1.
The new policy orders the Pentagon to discharge those service members who are unable to be deployed outside the U.S. for more than a year. According to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the point was to ensure “readiness” within the U.S. military.
But an existing DOD policy dating back to the height of the AIDS epidemic prohibits HIV+ service members from being deployed overseas. Therefore, the new guidance would appear to make it impossible to serve their country.
HIV+ folks are prohibited from enlisting in the Armed Forces. Soldiers who are already serving but later seroconvert are allowed to stay in the military, but cannot be deployed in combat or overseas.
Two soldiers have filed separate lawsuits – Doe v. Mattis and Harrison v. Mattis – hoping to stop the new policy from going into effect.
Forty-one-year old Sgt. Nick Harrison is afraid his life would be dramatically affected by the new policy.
Sgt. Harrison hopes to make a difference for other members of the Armed Forces. He isn’t being secretive about his identity, either. Harrison was deployed to both Afghanistan and Kuwait, but was diagnosed with HIV shortly after returning home from Kuwait in 2012. “This case is not just about me,” Harrison said. “This is about every person living with HIV knowing that they can perform any job in the world, including serving in the military. Together, we must stop the Pentagon from closing its doors to successful and talented service members. I look forward to the day that I can serve my country to the full extent of my abilities, based on my performance and unfettered by unfounded fears and misperceptions about HIV.”
Harrison also claims that the military’s policy wrongfully blocked him from ascending to Judge Advocate General officer of the D.C. National Guard, reports Bloomberg, because members living with HIV also cannot achieve officer status.
Scott Schoettes, Counsel and HIV Project Director at Lambda Legal, issued this statement regarding the discriminatory policy:
“Soldiers, sailors, fighter pilots and marines are seeing their promising careers cut short, their dreams of service shattered and their health jeopardized due to antiquated notions about HIV and the stigma that results. This must end. If the court doesn’t intervene, the Trump administration will continue to discharge more promising service members living with HIV, denying them the ability to continue serving their country. Every day, people living with HIV are suffering professional setbacks and losing out on career advancement opportunities, and we are asking this court to put an end to these harmful actions.”
According to HIVPlusMag, approximately 1,200 service members could be affected by the policy change.
A senior lesbian married couple in Missouri have been turned away by a senior housing community because of the couple’s sexual orientation.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting on a new law suit filed by Bev Nance, 68, and Mary Walsh, 72, who have been denied housing by the Friendship Village senior living community because they are married to each other.
The couple, who have been together for almost four decades and legally married since 2009, had toured the Sunset Hills location several times and even put down a $2,000 deposit.
According to the lawsuit, the couple were denied housing because their same-sex relationship violated Friendship Village’s cohabitation policy that views marriage as “the union of one man and one woman, as marriage is understood in the Bible.”
The Post Dispatch received a statement from Friendship Village which read: “We have just been made aware of a lawsuit that we have not yet seen and have not had an opportunity to review. This matter will be discussed with legal counsel and (we) have no further comment at this time.”
Nance and Walsh are being represented by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the ACLU and Washington-based law firm of Relman, Dane & Colfax.
The couple’s legal team says the policy violates the Fair Housing Act in terms of sex discrimination. Since the women are married to females, not men, the decision to deny them occupancy is, in essence, discrimination based on their sex.
“Mary and Bev were denied housing for one reason and one reason only — because they were married to each other rather than to men. This is exactly the type of sex discrimination the Fair Housing Act prohibits,” said Julie Wilensky, an attorney for the NCLR, said in a statement to the press. “Their story demonstrates the kind of exclusion and discrimination still facing same-sex couples of all ages.”
The couple attempted to move into Friendship Village in 2016. After multiple visits and several conversations with the staff they put down a $2,000 deposit in order to get on a waiting list. It was only after that they were informed of the “longstanding” policy on cohabitation.
The Friendship Village website says it is a nonprofit that provides “a fulfilling, worry-free lifestyle” to more than 1,000 seniors in Chesterfield and Sunset Hills. Its mission statement says, “Guided by Biblical values, continually serve the senior community with quality offerings that promote lifelong well-being.”
Walsh and Nance considered other housing but said Friendship Village was the only place in the St. Louis area “that can provide increased levels of care without an increased monthly cost to residents.”
According to the lawsuit, a letter to Walsh dated July 29, 2016, from Michael Heselbarth, a top administrator with the retirement village, said: “ Your request to share a single unit does not fall within the categories permitted by the long-standing policy of Friendship Village Sunset Hills.”
Legal experts are divided on the possibility of winning the lawsuit.
Anders Walker, a constitutional law professor at St. Louis University, told the Post-Dispatch, “My gut instinct is they’re probably out of luck.”
“When a private body doesn’t want to rent a room to you, for them, that’s freedom of association,” he added. “They’re probably entitled to their deposit back.”
But Marcia McCormick, an employment and labor law expert, says Friendship Village’s religious freedom claim “does have to be sincere. The defense of the First Amendment does not excuse discrimination in the Fair Housing Law.”
A few news items you might have missed: • It’s Hump Day – need I say more? (see above) • Two gay dads were stabbed by their adopted son in Los Angeles, California. #MentalHealthIssues? • Someone did some serious damage to Donald Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. • Twin gay models – the Zakar twins – have accused high-end photographer Rick Day of sexual abuse.
As Donald Trump accepted the nomination as the Republican candidate for president in 2016 at the Republican National Convention, he surprised many by including LGBTQ Americans in his speech.
In a halting, awkward cadence which made clear he had never uttered the phrase “L-G-B-T-Q” in his life, Trump promised to “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens.”
Now, in his new book The Briefing: Politics, The Press, and The President, former White House press secretary Sean Spicer shares how Team Trump was focused on a step-by-step plan to woo anti-Trump delegates – the “Never Trumpers” – who had signed a petition prior to the Republican convention.
People.com, which obtained a copy of Spicer’s book in advance of it’s release, shares the details of how the Trump campaign dismantled the “Never Trumpers” and added that one sentence to Trump’s speech as what People calls “nothing more than empty payback for a political favor.”
Spicer recalls the process saying, “[Trump campaign chairman Paul] Manafort and his lieutenants went one by one down the list of people who had signed the petition and persuaded them to remove their signatures.”
Manafort and his cohorts apparently used all kinds of methods to pick off their targets which Spicer describes as “alternating between carrot and stick and sometimes bat, even, at one point, conveniently making the convention’s parliamentarian unavailable to keep the opposition from formally submitting their petition.”
Finally, there was one last delegate left to convert to Trump Land – Washington, D.C. delegate Robert Sinners. Sinners, it seems, wanted the Trumpster to support LGBT rights.
Senior Trump communications advisor Jason Miller, who would later resign from Team Trump over a sordid sex scandal, was sent to do the deal.
“Jason assured Sinners that Trump would be the most ‘inclusive’ candidate the Republican Party ever had,” Spicer writes.
“This is your moment, Robert,” Miller told Sinners, according to the book. “You can deliver this.”
Sinners then reportedly signed “a form that officially removed his name from the petition,” and the deal was done.
“Jason told Sinners Donald Trump’s acceptance speech would acknowledge the LGBT[Q] community, which no other Republican acceptance speech had done,” Spicer writes. “And it did.”
And so it came to be that in July 2016 at the Republican National Convention, speaking about the 49 victims of the mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Donald Trump said, “As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”
He would go on to say at campaign rallies that he would be “much better for the gays” than Hillary Clinton.
He even tweeted about his loyalty to our community.
Thank you to the LGBT community! I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs.
Of course, the sad facts are Trump has been the worst president in modern history in terms of LGBTQ rights.
The Trump administration has, among many things, announced policies that would kick 1,200 HIV+ military service members out just because of their HIV status; deny transgender Americans the ability to serve in the military; has failed to acknowledge Pride Month two years in a row; reversed course on Obama-era guidance that protected transgender people in the workplace; and shown support for anti-gay baker Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cake Shop which discriminated against a gay couple seeking a cake for their wedding celebration.
According to The Hill, the ACLU has called Trump “the most anti-LGBT administration in at least a generation.”
Watch below as People recaps Donald Trump’s faux ‘support’ for the LGBTQ community.
The White House has chosen to post a oh-so-slightly edited version of the press conference with Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin the Helsinki summit.
The new White House version omits one sentence from a Reuters reporter asking Putin if he wanted Trump to win the 2016 election.
Rachel Maddow highlighted the edit during her broadcast Tuesday night.
Here’s the original transcript unedited:
Putin: “Options abound. And they all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.”
Reuters: “Mr. President, did you want President Trump to win the election? And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?
Putin: “Yes, I did. Yes, I did.”
Now, here’s the version the White House has posted
Putin: “Options abound. And they all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.”
Reuters: “And did you direct any of your officials to help him do that?
President Vladimir Putin: “Yes, I did. Yes, I did.”
Things that make you go ‘hmmm….’
Now, why edit just that one little question? Shouldn’t the White House be presenting history as it actually happened?
White House edits video to remove question about whether Putin wanted Trump to win. pic.twitter.com/ExlsHNlgF8
Tony & Grammy Award winner Billy Porter calls out “white, cisgender, rich boys” in the LGBTQ community for closing their checkbooks once they got marriage equality in a new interview with Vulture.
Porter, who’s never been meek when it comes to issues of equality and civil rights, shares in a candid, new interview how working on the hit FX television series Pose brought back memories of living through the AIDS epidemic in 1980s New York City.
Billy says he was reminded how the transgender community became practically “invisible” during that time.
“For me, as a 48-year-old gay man, when I came out, we had to fight for our lives. Because the fight was so intense — and this is what this show has taught me — the T in LGBTQ was almost invisible. The fight was about something else. I equate it to the idea of the civil rights movement, and Martin Luther King Jr. and his relationship with Bayard Rustin. He was the gay man that taught him and set him up to be the civil rights leader that he was, and was erased from the conversation because that wasn’t the fight.”
The Pose actor goes on to describe witnessing how some left the battle field (taking their money with them) when the focus of LGBTQ rights shifted from marriage to transgender protections.
“There’s a lot of that in the gay culture, especially the cisgender, white, rich gay culture. I sat on the board of the Empire State Pride Agenda for six years, and that’s an organization that really was influential in lobbying and fighting for gay rights, during the AIDS crisis all the way up through marriage equality. When these white, cisgender, rich boys got marriage equality and the organization’s focus turned to transgender rights, those motherfuckers closed their checkbooks, and the organization of 25 years had to close.”
Billy summed up his purview of the situation:
“We need take all that energy and focus, and shift it on to those who are less than us. That’s how it works. Internal vigilance is the price of liberty. If we don’t take care of the least among us, it doesn’t matter how rich we are, it doesn’t matter how fabulous we are.”
This writer has known Billy Porter since the early 1990’s when he made his Broadway debut in the hit musical, Miss Saigon.
Billy Porter and I celebrate his birthday in the early 2000s
Over the years we’ve worked together in the theare, and I’ve interviewed him several times as a journalist. I can always count on a frank, candid, and totally unfiltered experience with Billy. #Yassss
When we chatted last year about his latest album, Billy Porter Presents: The Soul of Richard Rodgers, I was all prepared for music chat. But fresh off the 2016 election, Billy was primed for political chat explaining how the album was a political statement in and of itself.
And I loved it.
You can check out our chat from my podcast interview below.
Speaking at San Diego’s Comic Con over the weekend, movie star Ryan Reynolds says he would like to see Deadpool’s infamous pansexuality explored in future films in the superhero franchise.
“I certainly think that this universe needs to represent and reflect the world in very real ways,” Ryan told fans during a Deadpool 2 panel this past weekend. “The great thing about Deadpool is that we’re allowed to do things that other superhero movies don’t necessarily do.”
Without being specific, Reynolds expressed his personal hope that Deadpool’s sexuality will be explored more fully in upcoming sequels.
“It’s something that I’d love to see more of, certainly through Wade, certainly through this universe,” said the 41-year-old Canadian actor.
In addition to the trademark pansexual quips made by the character Deadpool, Deadpool 2 did give us the first superhero LGBT relationship.
Female super sidekicks Yukio and Teenage Negasonic Warhead were featured as a romantic couple in the action flick.
In 2015, director Tim Miller, who helmed the first Deadpool flick, was adamant that the popular anti-hero would be pansexual.
“Pansexual. I want that quoted. Pansexual Deadpool,” he said in an interview with The Guardian at the time.
Pansexual refers to a person who sees no barriers when it comes to sexual partners regardless of their gender or gender identity.
In the comic books, Deadpool is definitely written to be pansexual. And there have been plenty of zippy one-liners alluding to wide-ranging sexual topics, but so far Deadpool’s only physical attraction has been to his girlfriend played by Morena Baccarin in the two Deadpool films.
While superhero movies have lagged in developing LGBTQ characters, there has been a lot more progress when it comes to superheroes on TV, especially in the DC universe.
It was just announced that transgender actress/activist Nicole Maines has been confirmed to play the first trans superhero “Dreamer” in the Supergirl TV series.
And producer Greg Berlanti recently shared he’s developing a new series for The CW for openly lesbian superhero, “Batwoman.”
DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow featured two gay superheroes on a parallel world, “Citizen Cold” and “The Ray,” in a recent crossover event played by out actors Wentworth Miller and Russell Tovey.
