New letter!

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I still haven’t come out to more than a small handful of people, but now that I realize how it has caused me to be so afraid of life, I intend to change that, very soon. I’m hoping that by typing this now it will make it easier in real life. After all, my heart is beating a lot softer now than it was when I first started typing this. And the sense of hope I’m feeling right now is overwhelming.

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See the rest: Jim’s letter to the world.

We got a letter from Corey Hidlebaugh recommending we link to soulforce.org. Here’s Soulforce’s mission statement:

The purpose of Soulforce is freedom for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people from religious and political oppression through the practice of relentless nonviolent resistance.

Corey also sent us a letter, which doesn’t fit the main OutNotes section (coming out letters to friends and family), so I’ll post it here:

Dear Friends,

Let me tell you my story.

I’ll never forget the night a man named Dennis Jernigan came to minister to my church. I was only thirteen, but I was passionate for an experience with God. He led
the congregation in songs that he had written, and each one seemed as if it had been written for me. There was something about this man that seemed so familiar to me
but I could not pinpoint it. It seemed as if we both had a secret we wanted no one to know. During the middle of his presentation, Dennis stopped singing and began
to tell his story. As I listened I could feel blood rushing to my face. Tears started rolling down my cheeks. It seemed he spoke directly at me. He was telling my
story. Dennis was talking about being gay.

(more…)

Silent Bob (a.k.a. Kevin Smith) reviews Brokeback Mountain:

This ain’t just the gay cowboy movie: it’s the saddest flick I’ve seen all year. And I love sad flicks - particularly well-made/well-acted ones about people not living their lives the way they really want to. Heath Ledger didn’t give a performance in this flick: his Ennis exists - that’s how genius his non-performance was. Not since Billy Bob Thorton in Raimi’s underrated “A Simple Plan” has an actor been buried so deep in a character that you forget there’s acting going on. Ang Lee, whose film directorial choices are always all over the place in a great way (”Wedding Banquet” to “Sense and Sensibility” to “Hulk” to “Brokeback”) made a great, great film.

Donna was there when our little girls were conceived, there for their births. She’s changed diapers, bandaged boo-boos, soothed bad dreams.

She’s Mama, no matter what.

But the reality for families like mine seems increasingly lost on lawmakers around the country, who appear to have little better to do than try to legislate us out of existence.

I already knew that there are people in the world, including some notoriously anti-gay state legislators here in Georgia, who would like to stop my partner from adopting our daughters.

Now, in what may be the next wave of attacks on gay families, it appears some lawmakers would stop them from being born at all.

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Rep. Robert Marshall (R-Manassas) sponsored the measure that would forbid medical professionals from providing to unmarried women “certain intervening medical technology” that “completely or partially replaces sexual intercourse as the means of conception.” The bill provides a list of medical procedures, including “artificial insemination by donor” and invitro fertilization.

Equality Virginia, the state’s gay political group, accurately denounced the measure as a “direct attack” on gay families. But unfortunately, it isn’t a novel idea.

From Washington Blade

The Cherokee Nation decided to recognize a gay marriage between two of its members:

The top court of the Cherokee Nation has declined to strike down a gay marriage in what is seen as a pioneering case in American Indian country, the couple and officials said on Wednesday.

Cherokee tribal members Kathy Reynolds, 29, and Dawn McKinley, 34, married in May 2004 in Oklahoma, just weeks after the city of San Francisco ignited a national debate on gay marriage by briefly allowing same-sex couples to wed.

Gay rights advocates say the pair are the first registered same-sex marriage in Indian country.

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The lawyer for the Tribal Council, Todd Hembree, said the tribe would no longer fight the marriage. “As far as the Tribal Council is concerned, that is the end of the legal proceeding,” he said in an interview on Wednesday.

He said it was also possible that the U.S. government would have to recognize the marriage because of the sovereign status of Indian tribes, which could, in theory at least, make them eligible for federal tax benefits denied to date to gay couples.

Lena Ayoub, an attorney who represented Reynolds and McKinley, said the federal government has not recognized any same-sex state marriages to date and called the federal obligation to recognize sovereign tribal marriage “a very complicated area of the law.”

Full Article found via AMERICAblog