Tagged: LGBT

It's been one week since Kansas City Chiefs player Jovan Belcher shocked the football world by shooting his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins, then himself. In the intervening seven days, people have tried to make sense of his actions in different ways. Could he have suffered concussions during his time on the field, which made him prone to violence and poor impulse control? Some outlets speculated Belcher was angry at Perkins for various reasons. ESPN was criticized for airing a graphic in tribute to Belcher.

To try to make some sense of the story and resulting coverage, we called Gina McCauley, who blogs at What About Our Daughters. McCauley says all the speculation about the causes of last Saturday's events is offensive, and an avoidance tactic. "Why are we going out of our way to ignore the fact that the reason this woman was murdered is because of misogyny and sexism?" she asks. "She was murdered because he wanted to control her in some way. He couldn't, so he killed her."

Her post on the murder cites the CDC statistic that black women ages 25-29 are about 11 times more likely than white women in that age group to be murdered while pregnant, or within one year of giving birth. She had a lot to share with us about the disparity in those numbers and why the media doesn't talk about it in cases like this.

We also spoke this week with documentary filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons, who directed "No! The Rape Documentary." In the film she examines sexual assault in communities of color, and unique issues surrounding survivors within our community. 

Joined by a coalition of Kentucky gay rights leaders, residents in Elizabethtown and Richmond are pressuring lawmakers to enact fairness laws in their cities.

The effort is part of a larger grassroots movement across the state to get such legislation passed in other cities such as Shelbyville, Bowling Green and Berea. Both ordinances would prohibit discrimination in employment, housing and public accommodations based on a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.

In Kentucky, only the cities of Covington, Lexington and Louisville have a fairness legislation.

Louisville Fairness Campaign Chris Hartman says many residents in rural areas of the state don’t know that discrimination against LGBT citizens is still permitted.

"I think that there’s an assumption that these protections already exist or they don’t even know that they are necessary. We found in the survey that indicated 83 percent of Kentuckians support Fairness, that the majority also have no idea that this type of discrimination is still legal in most of Kentucky," he says.

He's a poet, activist, counselor, wellness consultant, performance artist, and more. But this week, what got our attention about Yolo Akili was his article, Gay Men's Sexism and Women's Bodies. In it, he talks about incidents of gay men giving unsolicited advice about (and sometimes nonconsensually touching) women's bodies, and why it's often seen as more acceptable behavior in gay men than it would be in their straight brothers. We've talked before about how being gay doesn't give you a free pass to be racist; Yolo reminds us that it also doesn't give you carte blanche to make sexist comments or treat women's bodies like public property.

The largest-ever demographic study of America’s LGBT population was released last week, and the data revealed that African Americans and other ethnic minorities are more likely to identify as LGBT than white Americans.