It’s Sunday Funday all over again! That can only mean one thing: it’s time for another wild ride through the good gay news of the week. Buckle your belts, kiddos!
The Newlywed Corner
+ Carmen Carrera got married! On television!
The Year in Feminism, As Told By Young’ns
I obviously cannot get enough of this GoldieBlox ad. Can you? I can’t. Let’s watch it again, then click through the tiles at the end and lurk the YouTube presences of a bunch of children who are killin’ it.
A Festivus That Is Truly For the Rest of Us
It’s always nice when something good happens in Florida, like this Festivus pole that now graces the state capital lawn and is totally gay. Never again will I scream “serenity now” quite the same way.
Money, Money, Money, Money
+ “Nothing like this has ever happened.” The Arcus and NoVo Foundations just announced the Global Transgender Initiative, in which they will give at least $20M over the next five years to supporting trans activism in the US and in developing nations.
+ Angelina Jolie will donate all of her profits from “The Breadwinner” to educating Afghan girls.
Meet Tamara Adrian, Trans Congresswoman
Tamara Adrian was elected to Venezuela’s National Assembly last Sunday in a historic election.
“Yesterday, Venezuela demolished its own Berlin Wall,” Adrian tells Out. Her candidacy already represented a milestone in Venezuelan politics, but with her triumph she becomes the first transgender congresswoman of the nation and, according to her, of the Americas.
“Venezuela is going through the worst economic, social and cultural crisis ever recorded,” Adrian says, explaining that her agenda includes giving visibility to the problems that the Venezuelan LGBT community systematically faces. “We have to talk about the rights of couples and families, about the gender identity Act, about the mutilation of intersex children, and about discrimination, which includes hate crimes, bullying, workplace harassment, and access to housing and healthcare.”
By the Books
+ The City Council of Savannah, Georgia has banned discrimination against LGBT employees.
+ Cincinnati has passed the first citywide ban on LGBT “conversion therapy,” AKA junk science that makes people feel like garbage. They did so in memory of Leelah Alcorn, who lived in a suburb of the city.
+ Italy has approved its first “stepchild adoption” for a lesbian couple, making gay history and a safer family in the process.
+ Same-sex parents are now allowed on Arkansas birth certificates.
Three Words: Test Tube Puppies
IVF PUPPIES! IVF PUPPIES! IVF PUPPIES!
Wooooo Caster Semenya!!! And oh man,that commercial gives me some strong feelings.
Yes! I’m a huge longtime fan of Caster Semenya and I’m so happy for her! The IOC TOTALLY mistreated her for a long time. It’s great to see her looking happy and great at her wedding!
yes to this! i remember discussing the fucked-up IOC stuff in my gender studies courses way back when, and i was SO THRILLED to see a happy piece of news to share about her today!
Omg that year in feminism video was so cute!!! This year has been a wild ride
that video was my everything this week
apparently I am such a priss that for carmen carrera’s wedding photos my first reaction I was like HEY. HEY BUDDY. DID YOU ASK BEFORE YOU PUT YOUR HANDS ALL OVER HER BUTT.
I hope they are very happy and I am sure she is fine with having his hands on her butt I am just scarred from an adolescence of boys being like “hahaha butt touch I am king butt touch” and so I am unnecessarily revved up about it fifteen years later.
BUTT AUTONOMY FOR EVERYONE.
i had this thought too! but then i was like “i guess i’d grab my person’s butt in this situation so.”
right? I mean my wedding photos have zero butt-touching in them, but also I’m not carmen carrera, she can do what she wants.
This is the cutest conversation I’ve ever read on Autostraddle dot come
Interesting that you included a photo of Carmen Carrera and her partner but not of Caster Semenya or her wedding. It was weird that one wedding article link was accompanied by two large photos and the other was…not. I understand that there aren’t super good-quality photos of Semenya’s wedding online, but you could have at least included a picture of her for reference. Even if it wasn’t meant that way, such an omission does seem to play into some of the insidious racial politics that plague the mainstream LGBT community. Who is “acceptable” (read: lightskinned) enough to be seen and to be upheld, and who is not? What faces are featured when we celebrate queer and trans love? Is a picture of Semenya and her partner in traditional South African wedding clothes not “sellable” enough? Does an image of a muscled black athlete not mesh with the aesthetics of “The Newlywed Corner”?
hey! i’m really sorry if you got the impression that anything about the images in this post was meant to say any of that – it really was because HQ images are a requirement for our posts and i thus skipped out on including pictures of caster’s wedding. we do our best, and i do my best each week in this post, to include images of all different kinds of folks, as well as news about different communities. i definitely hear what you’re saying – but this decision had nothing to do with race. it was purely about the quality of images i had to choose from for each and every story, and the reason lots of other links here have no images is because they either didn’t have strong photos for me to pull or they had no photo at the source link for me at all.
beautiful people getting married, ivf puppies, small feminist children! what a week it’s been.
Oh, I am SO HAPPY that I watched that GoldieBox Video recapping the year in feminism. Best thing I did all Sunday.
Go dream big, girls!!
I had to watch the video again, and it was just as great the second time around
IVF puppies! I can’t handle the cute.
Whoa I somehow totally missed that Caster Semenya is sapphic. But aaaaahhhhh that is so awesome! Congrats to her and her wife!