LGBTQ Breaking News Service

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) — Get into the Pride Month Spirit as the world’s largest social network app for gays, BLUED puts the spotlight on diverse queer personalities with its campaign “Live Your Gay Life.”

In the Philippines, BLUED tapped funny content creators Pork Neilaga (Neil Esteban), Sassa Gurl (Felix Petate), and Pipay Kipay, DJ Mike Lavarez, film critic and HIV awareness advocate Wanggo Gallaga, and fellow HIV activist Benedict Bernabe to encourage fellow gays to #liveyourpride.

Each influencer will share their stories, vulnerabilities, and wins as gay people and connect with others via social posts and livestreams on the BLUED app. BLUED hopes that gays will find the app an inclusive safe space where all types of gays should feel visible. From muscular to chubs, manly to effems, straight-acting to woman-presenting; BLUED believes that every gay should feel welcomed, celebrated, and well-represented online and even in real life.

This campaign will also feature photos of these notable gay personalities in the Philippines who will show how they live their gay life amidst the pandemic. The shots will be more candid and raw, offering glimpses into their daily lives that aim to engage more gays in the Philippines to do their own versions of the post.

During Pride 2021, Blued will also launch special campaigns across different countries and regions that are tailored to the local community. Check out the global ad for the campaign below.

“Our main objective is to empower all types of gays to feel visible and well-represented online and even in real life and ultimately drive home that Blued is a safe space for gay men where you can freely ‘Live Your Gay Life’,” Blued said in an official statement.

This June, Blued also features a special rainbow UI (user interface) to commemorate Pride Month. The iconic Pride rainbow will be displayed prominently on Blued’s many app store pages, as well as in different locations within the in-app UI.

As today’s world reduces us to creatures of instant gratification, reduced to the number of likes on a selfie, reduced to a single idea of who we should be—skinny, fit, and conventionally attractive, in BLUED, there is space for the real you— a space for real conversations, for real relationships, for real people. BLUED is a community where you can live your gay life.

Mobile app BLUED is a location-based social networking service that allows the LGBTQ community to conveniently and safely connect with each other and express themselves, integrating live streaming services with customizable social news feeds, video and voice calls, as well as access to professional health-related services in select markets. Download BLUED on App Store or Google Play.

A gay Alabama teen stabbed a man in the back after the man attacked him and two of his friends in Florida when the suspect learned of his sexual orientation, police said.

The 18-year-old Mobile resident was taking a TikTok video with two Alabama friends early Monday morning in Miami Beach when Glenford Rhule Jr., 24, began insulting them and throwing chairs at them, according to a Miami Beach police incident report.

One of the teen’s friends, a 19-year-old Semmes resident, told police that Rhule asked the 18-year-old if he was gay and that the suspect then threw a drink at the friends and lunged at them.

The 19-year-old also told police that he was hit by one of the chairs Rhule threw at them but was not injured.

The group then scattered away from Rhule when the 18-year-old was later cornered by the homeless suspect, who began punching him, the police report states.

The 18-year-old found a “random knife” that was on the street near where the incident occurred and stabbed Rhule in the back “for fear of his safety.”

A third friend, a 20-year-old Semmes man, was punched in the face during the attack and suffered a cut to his face.

The friends were eventually able to run to a nearby hotel to ask for help.

Rhule was arrested Monday on a charge of battery.

Prosecutors are looking into the possibility of charging Rhule with a hate crime, according to Miami Fox affiliate WSVN, which first reported the incident.

Greece co-signed a declaration signed also by 14 other EU member-states condemning Hungary on Tuesday for a new anti-LGBTQ law which bans  the “display and promotion of homosexuality” among under-18s.

“The clear position we took in yesterday’s council is reflected today in the co-signing of the relevant joint statement,” he added.

The declaration states that the Hungarian law violates the right to freedom of expression and is a “flagrant form of discrimination based on sexual orientation.”

By C.J. Janovy

Jon Reed Sims was born in Smith Center, Kansas, in May 1947. When he died, in July 1984, it made news in San Francisco.

A newspaper there showed then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein giving Sims a key to the city. The caption said he was “a favorite” of the woman who is now a long-serving U.S. senator.

“He Spawned a World of Music; Jon Sims is Dead at Age 37,” read the headline.

Sims was one of the early casualties of AIDS. But before he died far too young, he created something that lives on — loudly, joyfully and powerfully.

In 1978, Sims founded the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band, igniting an international cultural phenomenon: there are now gay men’s choruses and bands throughout the world, including in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Northern Ohio.

A few years ago, wanting to know more about this son of Smith Center who’s revered in San Francisco but forgotten in Kansas, I tracked down his sister, Judith Sims Billings, who lives in Nebraska. She sent me a history she’d written for the San Francisco Bay Times, a gay newspaper.

Sims was born on a farm near Lebanon and the family later moved to a farm closer to Smith Center. Jon started taking piano lessons when he was 6, and named his 4-H livestock after composers.

“The fact that he was practically the only male in the county who took sewing and cooking in 4-H didn’t seem to bother Jon, and Mother just acted like it was the most normal thing,” Billings wrote. “Our parents encouraged us to do anything we wanted to, seeing no real boundaries. Jon won first place at the Kansas State Fair for his sugar cookies.”

He took up the cornet to play in the Smith Center High School band, then learned to play the tuba because the band needed one and ultimately found his “calling” with the French horn.

“Jon was kind and considerate of everyone and always spoke to and helped these older women he’d met through our grandmothers,” Billings recalled. “This was the same generation of women who taught him to knit and crochet when he was in grade school.”

Sims started college at Fort Hays State University, then transferred to Wichita State University to study French horn and composition.

“He was a very flamboyant drum major at both universities,” Billings wrote.

Her brother went on to grad school at Indiana University, then taught junior high music in Chicago before moving to San Francisco.

“It was a time of Anita Bryant and much prejudice towards the community,” she wrote. “Jon told me he was not interested in making a political statement — he just wanted to get people together to have fun making music.”

But for oppressed communities, having fun and making music is inherently political.

Sims didn’t come out to the family until after their mother died in 1975, Billings wrote: “We are not sure if she knew, but Mother always said, ‘Jon marches to a different drummer.’ ”

Billings said her family was always proud of Sims, “but none of us realized the impact he would have. I continue to be amazed and proud of the impact of his vision.”

It’s hard to think about Sims without thinking of another gay Kansan who made an indelible mark on the world. Gilbert Baker, who designed the rainbow flag, was born in Chanute and grew up in Parsons. He got the hell out as soon as he could. In recent years, his classmates in the Parsons High School class of 1969 have worked to memorialize his legacy.

I took a Pride Month drive out to Smith Center, where the woman who answered the phone at the high school contacted someone whose dad graduated with Sims in the class of 1965.

Mike Isom spent his career as a history teacher and guidance counselor in nearby Kensington.

Looking through old annuals, Isom pointed out every photo of the young handsome Sims in the 1965 Centrian: Sims in the band, the chorus, the boys’ octet, the glee club, the horn trio, the mixed ensemble, the all-school play, the yearbook staff, the national honor society, the service organizations.

“He was accepted,” Isom said of Sims.

Though they ran in different crowds, Isom described Sims as happy and carefree, remembering how, one night, 14 people crammed into Sims’ big car — “I think it was a 1949 Plymouth or something like that,” Isom said — to get into the drive-in movie on dollar night.

“There might have been other people who thought he might be gay — I may use that term now, but not back then we wouldn’t use it,” Isom said, noting that the meanings of words had changed over the years. “And we just thought it was strange that he liked to hang around the girls. But he was musically inclined.”

Based on the “prophesies” students wrote to imagine their futures, Sims was self-aware enough to make a joke about what his future held:

Isom didn’t remember how he heard about Sims’ founding of the gay men’s chorus.

“I thought that was an accomplishment,” he said. “And I had heard that he was sort of big in the movement out there.”

Isom said he didn’t know how much support there’d be for a plaque or some other kind of memorial to Sims.

“I would assume that if people knew his accomplishments, they might be willing to do that,” he said. “And also, there are people that would be totally against — you know what I’m saying?”

He was saying that this part of Kansas is mighty conservative.

But LGBTQ people do live in Smith Center, just like we live everywhere. Knowing they’re in a place that produced someone who made such a great contribution to our culture might brighten their world a bit.

Besides, there already is a memorial to Sims. It’s a headstone at the Fairview Cemetery, alongside his mother Marie Belle and his father Delmar, who died in 1980.

On the hot afternoon I paid my respects, the only sounds were the wind and a couple of lonesome meadowlarks. It felt too quiet a resting place for someone who spent his life making big, beautiful music.

But maybe it’s quiet enough for Jon Reed Sims’ spirit to hear all the joyful sounds he brought to life, still reverberating out in the world.

C.J. Janovy is a veteran journalist with deep roots in the Midwest. Before joining the States Newsroom’s Kansas Reflector, she was an editor and reporter at Kansas City’s NPR affiliate, KCUR. Before that, she edited the city’s alt-weekly newspaper, The Pitch, where Janovy and her writers won numerous local, regional and national awards. Her book “No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas” was among the Kansas Notable Books of 2019.

The growing Julius Eastman revival throughout the new music community in the past few years seems, particularly from hindsight, inevitable. It would be hard to find an artist who personifies so many issues of our day — Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ rights, homelessness, income inequality, mental health, addiction, you name it.

An extraordinarily gifted composer, vocalist, pianist, dancer and choreographer, Eastman had a magnetic presence and gripping sense of theater. He was proudly and provocatively Black and gay. He could be — personally and in his art — lovable and discomfiting. It didn’t matter whether you were white or Black, straight or gay: He had something up his sleeve for any of us. No one got off easy with Eastman. Whether through the shocking titles for many of his pieces or his relationships with lovers and cherished colleagues, he challenged so many forms of prejudice.

Eastman, who was born in 1940, rose like a comet with spectacular flair and flamed out just as stunningly, dying at 50 in obscurity — homeless and alone. His music — what is left of it (much is lost, all of it a mess) — requires Herculean reconstruction efforts. His life is a documentary or biopic waiting to happen.

Ever alien and alienating, the inscrutable Eastman has seemed destined to remain a new music outsider. He is simply too difficult and disturbing. Comets come and comets go. Or do they? In a remarkable series of events, the Eastman revival has taken a surprisingly trendy turn.

The Los Angeles new music collective Wild Up released a sensational recording Friday on the New Amsterdam label of Eastman’s seriously challenging, incessantly repetitious 1974 “Femenine.” The majestic effusiveness of this performance is such that it instantly changes the landscape, revealing new possibilities for a far and wide acceptance of Eastman’s music.

This comes on the heels of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s announcement of a free chamber music program combining Eastman with the popular Estonian spiritual minimalist Arvo Pärt at the Ford on Aug. 3. Two weeks later, Eastman will be paired on a program with another Eastern European mystic Minimalist, Henryk Górecki, at another festival, the Proms in London.

Most unexpected of all has been the news that the New York Philharmonic will give the first professional performance of Eastman’s disquieting Symphony No. II — “The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend’s Love for the Beloved” — found in a drawer and reconstructed. The symphony will be part of a regular subscription concert series in February that will be conducted by the orchestra’s music director, Jaap van Zweden, and that opens with Beethoven and Berlioz.

But back to “Femenine,” which Wild Up performed three years ago at the Monday Evening Concerts and again Thursday night outdoors at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa to promote the new release. It was written during Eastman’s most promising years, when he was a member of a flourishing new music scene at State University of New York’s Buffalo campus. Eastman — who grew up in Ithaca, N.Y., and attended the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia — was turning heads wherever he went and whatever he was doing.

He was an extraordinary vocalist who sang in the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s new music series under Zubin Mehta. He appeared with Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic. He was nominated for a Grammy for his compelling performance of Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Eight Songs for a Mad King.” He toured Europe to stamping, cheering crowds with a work, “Stay on It,” that gave the formalist Minimalism of the moment an irreverent jazz-pop-improvisation kick in the behind.

“Stay on It,” which also has a gripping recent recording from another L.A. institution, Jacaranda, had been Eastman’s breakthrough. He aggressively pummels a melodic figure with a ferocity that intimates a session of unbearable irritation. Instead, though, he breaks down your defenses with glorious effusions of new material, opening you up to what becomes a new kind of musical spirituality.

“Femenine” takes that process further. It was originally part of a duality, with “Masculine” played at the same time, but that is one of Eastman’s many lost scores. At one time, when living in New York, he was evicted from his apartment for not paying the rent. He never bothered to collect his scores. He didn’t bother with possessions or, often, necessities. He was on a messianic and ultimately self-destructive mission.

The documentation we have of “Femenine” is an extremely sketchy score and an archival 1974 recording by the S.E.M. Ensemble, of which Eastman had been a member. Not much is known about that performance in Albany, which included local students. At the premiere in Buffalo a year earlier, Eastman prepared and served soup during the performance and wore a dress.

An awful lot is left to the performers to figure out. There is leeway in the instrumentation and number of performers. Putting a performance together requires the kinds of creativity needed to realize a jazz chart or a medieval manuscript. It has to be recognizably Eastman, but it also has to have a performer’s identity.

Wild Up, led by Christopher Rountree, adds a narrative that you can use to follow its performance, giving titles to 10 sections of “Femenine,” such as “Create New Pattern”’ “Be Thou My Vision” and “Pianist Will Interrupt Must Return.” Take ’em or, as I prefer, leave ’em.

This is not the only recording of “Femenine.” There are a few now, and all are bold and powerful. Wild Up, however, goes beyond all the others in capturing the sheer expansiveness of Eastman’s music. The repeated rhythmic tick that begins everything and never quite goes away is heard here as an invitation to dream. It is the sound of stepping out of yourself.

What that means, what follows (and, boy, does a lot follow) is not for me to say but for every listener to find out individually. It’s the search that matters. And that leads to maybe the most shocking aspect of the shocking Eastman. His search for self and spiritual transmigration led to his downfall and has to become a cautionary tale.

Eastman may have been welcomed for being a gay Black man in a mostly white, if sexually fluid, new music community, but that only seemed to underlie his outsider status. To be personally accepted wasn’t the point. For Eastman, an anodyne new music culture that prided itself on functioning outside of personal identity is what needed changing.

I remember Eastman well when he worked at the downtown Tower Records in New York in the late 1980s. I lived in New York and regularly ran into luminaries who came to hang out and schmooze with Julius. The Julius I encountered was a sweet man, angelic even.

But angels are all-seers. Eastman proved brutally direct and confrontational. He infamously titled ferocious pieces for multiple pianos with the inflammatory titles using the N-word (“Crazy N—” and “Evil N—”). He wanted there be nowhere to hide, and he left nowhere for himself to hide, either.

An essential resource on Eastman is the book “Gay Guerilla,” edited by Renée Levine Packer and Mary Jane Leach. In the book, Ned Sublette — Eastman’s close New York friend, a composer, guitarist and musicologist — perceptively remarks that “Julius was only on loan to the white music world.”

In the end, he was only on loan to the world. He didn’t fit in anywhere. He ultimately alienated pretty much everyone. He seems to have been beyond help. In a small way, I tried. I told him his music needed to be heard. He needed recordings. I introduced him to a publisher who took an instant interest. As a contributor to the Wall Street Journal at the time, I suggested writing a profile of him in hopes of bringing his work and his story to a broader audience than that of the Village Voice (or occasionally the New York Times), where he might be reviewed. He said sure but no doubt smelled trouble.

Then he disappeared. No one knew what had happened to him. A year later we learned that he had died of heart failure, half starved, refusing help.

It is now up to us to piece Eastman and his music together. Wild Up’s “Femenine” is a revelation. Hearing it is like hearing Terry Riley’s “In C” for the first time. It has what it takes, in any just musical realm, to become a popular sensation. It is also the first of what will be several Eastman New Amsterdam recordings by the ensemble. The comet is back in sight and maybe for good.

Julius Eastman, left, with other musicians of the S.E.M. Ensemble: Roberto Laneri on clarinet, Jan Williams on percussion and Petr Kotík on flute.

(© Jim Tuttle / Bridgeman Images)

• Insider investigated the campaign finance records of Arkansas lawmakers who sponsored anti-transgender legislation.
• Several visibly LGBT-friendly companies, their agents, and franchise owners gave money to the laws’ sponsors.
• McDonald’s franchise owners and State Farm agents donated a combined $107,000 to the Arkansas legislators.
• See more stories on Insider’s business page.

The franchisees and agents of companies like McDonald’s and State Farm directed vast sums to legislators that backed some of the most anti-LGBT legislation passed this year.

Arkansas was one of several states across the US that enacted legislation restricting trans women from playing on women’s sports teams during the 2021 legislative session and was the only state to pass legislation that aims to remove access to medical care and punish those who treat trans youth.

Insider pored through campaign finance records from the Arkansas Secretary of State for the 76 members of the Arkansas legislature who sponsored House Bill 1570 or Senate Bill 354. We then digitized the records to identify key corporate supporters and found that several corporations that position themselves as LGBT allies have agents, employees, and franchise owners that donated to the sponsors of Arkansas legislation using their company’s name and branding since 2018.

State Farm Insurance, for example, frequently takes part in local Pride Month events and proudly touts the company’s support on its website. State Farm public affairs specialist Michal Brower told Insider that the company does not donate directly to state legislators.

“State Farm does have a Federal PAC (SFF PAC), which allows our employees and agents to collectively provide funds to individual candidates across party lines,” Brower said. “The SFF PAC does not provide contributions to state-level candidates or legislators in Arkansas, past or present.”

But while the company itself did not send money to Arkansas legislators, several of its individual agents donated $72,000 through a separate political action committee: the Arkansas State Farm Association PAC. The two surviving PAC officers did not respond to Insider’s request for comment.

—State Farm (@StateFarm) June 8, 2021

Much like State Farm, McDonald’s also proudly positions itself as a supportive ally of the LGBT+ community through various digital campaigns and media sponsorships, but McDonald’s franchise owners donated a combined $35,000 to 52 of the sponsors of the anti-trans legislation since 2018 through the McDonald’s Local Owner Operators of Arkansas PAC.

The company promotes on its Diversity and Inclusion webpage that it received a perfect score in each of the last five years on the Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index. McDonald’s did not respond to Insider’s request for comment.

LGBT advocates told Insider that corporate support on Pride Month is inadequate if the company continues to finance the sponsors of deleterious legislation.

“Corporations can’t celebrate Pride with us in June and expect us to look the other way if they fund anti-LGBTQ campaigns, legislators, and activist groups,” GLAAD Rapid Response Manager Mary Emily O’Hara told Insider. “Being a corporate ally means speaking up for what’s right and helping fight anti-LGBTQ discrimination all year long. It’s not just throwing a rainbow on some packaging one month out of the year.”

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The Los Angeles LGBT Center announced Wednesday it will help recruit hundreds of people to participate in a pilot study launched by three of the nation’s largest blood centers in an effort to change policy that prevents most gay and bisexual men from donating blood.

The study, funded through a contract with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, is focused on evaluating alternatives to the FDA’s current blood donor “deferral” policy that men be deferred from donating blood for three months following the most recent sexual contact with another man.

The FDA revised the deferral policy from one year to three months just over a year ago.

“The elimination of the FDA’s archaic blood donation policy for gay and bi men is long overdue,” said Dr. Robert Bolan, the center’s chief medical officer. “The decades-old policy was enacted at a time when there was little science on the mechanisms of HIV transmission and the epidemic was concentrated in the gay community.”

Bolan noted that the center is eager to contribute through the study to “ending the stigma surrounding HIV and AIDS and the discrimination that targets gay and bisexual men.”

The center is one of eight LGBT centers nationwide each responsible for recruiting 250 to 300 gay and bisexual men between 18 and 39 years old for the study by Vitalant, OneBlood and the American Red Cross, which collectively represent about 60% of the U.S. blood supply.

Study participants will have a blood sample drawn for HIV testing and answer questions designed to determine individual HIV risk factors. The study will assess if the questions related to behavior are effective in distinguishing between MSM who have recently tested positive for HIV and those who have not, and help to determine the next steps to modify the donor history questionnaire.

The questions are designed to assess risk factors that could indicate possible infection with a transfusion transmissible infection, including HIV.

“If the scientific evidence supports the use of the different questions, it could mean gay and bisexual men who present to donate would be assessed based upon their own individual risk for HIV infection and not according to when their last sexual contact with another man occurred,” said Susan Stramer, vice president of scientific affairs with American Red Cross Biomedical Services.

Study data will be submitted to the FDA, which will review the findings and determine the next steps.

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