Page 4 | November 9, 2006 | Bay Windows
news in brief
QueerToday will raise money
at Phelps protest
Fred Phelps and members of his Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) plan to protest
outside the memorial service for Massachusetts Congressman Gerry Studds Dec. 2.
Studds, the first openly gay person elected
to Congress, passed away last month. But
the activist group QueerToday.com is striking back against Phelps and his church,
using the WBC protest to help raise funds
for LGBT and HIV/AIDS organizations by
holding a Fred Phelps Pledge-a-Thon.
Participants in the pledge-a-thon commit to donate a certain sum of money in
Studds’s honor to the LGBT or HIV/AIDS
group of their choice either based on the
number of WBC protestors at the memorial
or based on the duration of time they hold
their protest. QueerToday.com founder
Mark Snyder said holding the pledge-athon rather than protesting seemed the best
way to respond to the WBC protest without
causing further disruption to the memorial
for Studds, which will be held at Boston’s
John F. Kennedy Library.
“Most people think ignoring [Phelps] is
the best idea, [but] having him raise money
for us is working well,” said Snyder.
Currently Snyder said the pledge-a-thon
has raised about $1400 going to groups
such as the Boston Alliance for Gay and
Lesbian Youth (BAGLY), the Massachusetts
Transgender Political Coalition (MTPC),
Log Cabin Republicans and SpeakOut
Boston as well as AIDS research. The idea
for the event came from other “Phelpsa-Thons” held in cities like Roanoke and
Back in the early 1970s David
Peterson and three other
volunteers with SpeakOut Boston
traveled to a high school in the
Needham-Newton area to talk to
one of the classes about what
it was like to live as out gay and
lesbian people. It was one of
the few times back in the early
days of SpeakOut when the
organization was invited to speak
to a high school audience, as
opposed to an older college
class or a church group, but this
was an alternative school where
students were allowed to plan
their own curriculum, and one
class of students had specifically
requested that SpeakOut talk to
their class. Peterson said when
he and his fellow volunteers
arrived they were stopped at the
doorway and told they were not
allowed inside the building.
“We were met at the door of
the school by a very nervous
teacher who said, ‘I’m sorry,
but the school administration
won’t let you come in. They’ve
had complaints from parents,’”
said Peterson. “But he said the
class, when they heard this,
were outraged, and they voted
to officially cancel the class …
[He said], ‘The students have
also decided to go to one of the
student’s homes who lives nearby
where they will go and hang out,
and you are welcome to hang out
with us.”
Peterson said the entire class and
the SpeakOut volunteers traveled
to the student’s house and held
the speaking engagement there.
The volunteers stuck to the
standard format: each speaker
told his or her own story about
figuring out they were gay or
lesbian, coming out, and living as
openly gay and lesbian people,
and after their story they took
Nashville, where in 2003 participants
raised about $10,000 for Nashville Cares,
an HIV/AIDS service organization. Snyder
praised the political blog BlueMassGroup
for helping brainstorm and publicize the
pledge-a-thon.
QueerToday.com is asking participants
in the pledge-a-thon to pledge a minimum
donation in the event that Phelps and his
followers cancel their protest. WBC has a
history of publicizing protests and then failing to appear on the day of the event.
“That way even if Fred Phelps doesn’t
show up, which he often doesn’t, Gerry
Studds will still be honored and the organizations will still receive a donation,” said
Snyder.
The tribute to Congressman Gerry Studds’s
life and work will be held Dec. 2 at 1 p.m.
at the John F. Kennedy Library. The event is
open to the public. For more information on
the Fred Phelps Pledge-a-Thon visit www.
queertoday.com.
— Ethan Jacobs
Infertility group reaches out
to the gays
Thinking about fertility treatment,
surrogacy or adoption as a path to parenthood? Then you might want to check out
the annual conference of RESOLVE of the
Bay State, an infertility support, education
and advocacy group, on Nov. 12. For the
first time in its 13-year history, the conference is reaching out specifically to gay and
lesbian prospective parents through several
customized presentations.
Among the more than 40 workshops on
the agenda at the day-long conference are
presentations on gay adoption planning led
by Bev Baccelli, the director of the Marionbased Southeastern Adoption Services,
which has facilitated countless adoptions
by same-sex couples, and an informational
session on parenting resources for samesex couples and surrogacy issues for gay
men led by Liz Coolidge, the coordinator
of GLBT Family and Parenting Services at
the Fenway Community Health Center and
John Weltman, the president of Circle Surrogacy and a proud gay parent of two sons
born to a surrogate mother. The conference,
titled “Achieving Parenthood: The Road to
Resolution,” will be held at the Best Western
Royal Plaza Hotel in Marlboro.
Several factors figured into RESOLVE
of the Bay State’s decision to create the targeted programming, said Rebecca Lubens,
the group’s executive director. First, feedback from past gay attendees indicated that
they found most of the workshops helpful,
said Lubens. But “they also saw a need for
more essentially gay-specific information.”
For instance, in the matter of international
adoption, many foreign countries do not
permit same-sex couples to adopt children,
leaving prospective gay parents with the
choice of either sending one of them back
into the closet or choosing another route
to parenthood. Homophobia also still rears
its head for some same-sex couples during
the process of family planning, Lubens
noted; the organization wants to inform
LGBT people that there are gay-friendly
service providers equipped to work with
them. Generally speaking, RESOLVE of
the Bay State tries “to meet the needs of the
people who come to us,” said Lubens. “And
we’ve also been hearing from the treatment
clinics, that they’re giving treatments or
giving support for gay and lesbian potential
families, so we wanted to be welcoming,”
she added.
There will be plenty of information to be
had at the conference, which is the only one
of its kind in New England. In addition to the
LGBT-specific workshops, attendees can learn
everything they ever wanted to know about
in vitro fertilization, get tips on overcoming
the emotional challenges of infertility, and
examine the medical and emotional aspects
of pursuing egg donation, just for starters.
Representatives from a host of fertility clinics,
pharmaceutical companies, adoption agencies
and surrogacy organizations will also be on
hand, both as exhibitors and as workshop
leaders. “What’s great about this conference,
it’s like one-stop shopping,” said Davidson.
For more information/ registration
visit www.resolveofthebaystate.org or call
781.890.2225. The conference fee, which
includes lunch, is $160 per person, $250 per
couple. Discounted registration fees of $95 per
person and $175 per couple are available for
RESOLVE members. The discount is available immediately for anyone who joins with
registration.
— Laura Kiritsy
SpeakOut turns 35!
questions. Yet Peterson said
the event was one of their best
experiences in the early years of
SpeakOut because the students
saw firsthand the discrimination
aimed at gay and lesbian people.
“It was like, how outrageous
that these four people aren’t
allowed to come into a public
school,” said Peterson. “They
were just outraged and couldn’t
understand why we weren’t
allowed to fully participate.”
For 35 years SpeakOut has
been using the power of
people’s personal stories to
change people’s minds about
LGBT issues. The organization
celebrates its 35th anniversary
with a Nov. 12 drag bingo and
bowling extravaganza at Jamaica
Plain’s Milky Way. The event will
feature performances from local
drag queens and kings, and
attendees will have the chance
to flex their bingo skills to win
prizes, with all proceeds going
to SpeakOut. Jennifer Bergman,
chair of SpeakOut, said the
event is part of an effort started
over the past year to raise the
organization’s profile, in part
to help the organization raise
enough funding to keep doing
its work at a time when non-profit
funding is scarce. She said the
event is a way to “really capitalize
on our history and to embrace
our history and to also see our
future.”
Things have changed quite a bit
since SpeakOut first launched.
Back in 1972 two separate
organizations, the lesbian
Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) and
the largely male Homophile
Union of Boston (HUB) ran
separate speaker’s programs,
although they frequently
collaborated. That year two HUB
members, Peterson and Harry
Phillips, and Laura McMurry
of DOB, created a separate
organization to focus exclusively
on the speaking engagements. In
those early years the organization
sent speakers to diverse settings
ranging from college psychology
classes to Unitarian churches to
Rotary Club meetings. Peterson
said audiences asked a range of
questions, everything from how
the speakers knew they were gay
and how their parents reacted
when they came out to questions
that might seem shockingly
un-P.C. today, such as how you
could tell if someone was a
lesbian, among others. Peterson
said a common question was,
“In your relationship which of you
is the man, which of you is the
woman? That one came up a lot.”
Yet Peterson said overall most
audiences were friendly, and
while some audience members
spent the speaking engagements
scowling at them, they rarely
turned confrontational.
By the mid-90s, when the Safe
Schools programs were working
to improve the climate for
LGBT students in high schools,
SpeakOut suddenly found itself
speaking to many more high
school classrooms. Scott Grady,
a SpeakOut volunteer for the
past 12 years, said when he first
started many of his first speaking
engagements were at schools
requesting SpeakOut volunteers
for the first time. Grady said
particularly back when he started
the most common misconception
students had about gay people
was that they were all alike; often
they expected all gay men to
be feminine and all lesbians to
be masculine, and they were
surprised when the speakers did
not all fit those stereotypes.
“For us it was showing them that
people who are gay and lesbian
come in every shape, size and
type, every masculinity and
femininity,” said Grady.
Over the past 12 years much
of SpeakOut’s focus has been
doing speaking engagements
at high schools, often in health
classes and assemblies, and
Grady said over time things
have changed dramatically. The
biggest change has been that
now more likely than not when
SpeakOut volunteers visit a
school, there are already openly
LGBT students at the school.
Another big change is that
students are on the whole much
more accepting of LGBT people,
and they do not think being gay
or lesbian is a choice.
“The other [major change] was the
idea of choice, understanding that
it’s not a choice … I think today for
most audiences it’s assumed that
it’s not a choice,” said Grady. He
said rather than debate whether
or not people choose to be gay,
students today are more interested
in talking about same-sex marriage
and parenting by LGBT parents.
Bergman agreed that on the whole
students are generally much more
accepting of LGBT people.
“One of the questions [on our
post-speaking engagement
evaluations] is, will you treat
GLBT individuals differently as a
result of this, and the response
for many of them is, well, I was
already pretty good before,” said
Bergman. Yet she said there
are other areas where students
are not quite as informed, and
she said many of the current
speaking engagements focus
on topics like same-sex marriage
and transgender issues.
For Grady, what has kept him
involved with SpeakOut for
more than a decade has been
the feeling that each speaking
engagement was making a
difference in how people viewed
their LGBT peers.
“For me the gratification of having
the interaction with the kids and
adults, the feeling that we have
created change and that with each
engagement we have we create
change, it’s just very motivating,
very satisfying,” said Grady.
Bergman agreed, saying,
“Personally I feel that this is the
best form of activism there is. I’m
personally not someone who will
hold up a sign and shout. This is
the kind of activism that works for
me because it’s so intimate and
so personal.”
SpeakOut’s 35th anniversary
drag bingo and bowling
extravaganza takes place Nov. 12
at the Milky Way in Jamaica Plain
at 7 p.m. Admission is $25 and
includes two bingo cards and
bowling. For more information
visit www.speakoutboston.org or
call 617.238.2470.
— Ethan Jacobs