LGBTQ Breaking News Service

A gay Black man seeks to “slash gender norms” in the perfume industry with his fragrance brand as he works to expand online sales.

Nick Yeast II founded the Nick Ricardo Collection — a gender-neutral fragrance brand that also seeks to “elevate the narrative of the POC, nonbinary, transgender, and gender-nonconforming individual,” he said.

Speaking to the Bay Area Reporter, the 28-year-old flight attendant said that, for years, he never thought he’d go into making fragrances.

“Fragrances have always been a mood-enhancer for me,” said Yeast, who has a place with his husband in San Francisco. “I’d get compliments for the fragrances that I wore in high school, and that made me feel good, but I never thought I’d get into fragrances until I went to South Korea on a solo trip.”

It was there that the budding scent maker took a fragrance-making class in October 2017.

“I fell in love with the ladies in the shop,” Yeast said. “I made my first bottle at the workshop and wore that fragrance; [and] people complimented me.”

For much of the next year, Yeast then undertook learning the art of perfumery.

“I was so new to all this,” Yeast said. “If you don’t really know, you get the right people in your circle who do know. I had no idea there was such a fragrance community out there.”

As he got into the “nitty-gritty” of developing the right scents for his brand, Yeast learned that “some people make them at home, some studied and some learned the game like I did.”

“Eventually we ended up in the lab with the experts,” Yeast said.

In 2019, the Nick Ricardo Collection was finally released to the public.

“We were in a couple boutiques. I did a launch party in New York and I was at the Taylor Jay Collection in Oakland,” Yeast said. “With the pandemic, and more and more business heading to e-commerce, it made sense to move online because we work with online retailers as well.”

Since the move to sell exclusively online, Yeast said business has not necessarily been better, “but it’s a good, steady presence we have in the fragrance community.”

There are four fragrances in the collection as of now: Onyx, Turbulent, Desire, and Mention. Each costs $64 for a 50ML/1.7oz bottle, and a $1 from every online purchase is donated to the Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project.

“On our website we have our Be You sample collection — a ‘try before you buy’ type thing,” Yeast said. “It comes with a 15% off discount when you get samples.”

The collection is named after his father, Nick Ricardo Yeast I, who he described as “a baby boomer parent who’s hella supportive of their kid.”

The younger Yeast said that he came out to his father as a teenager in Kentucky and was supported.

“The Yeast family in the sports world is a household name,” the younger Yeast said. “I definitely didn’t beat to that drum.”

The elder Yeast told the B.A.R. that he played college football for Eastern Kentucky University from 1979 to 1982, at the same time the team won championships. He said he shares knowledge of his son’s fragrances “everywhere I go and with everyone,” and that he wears them frequently.

“I like the Turbulent,” the elder Yeast said. “But I like every single one of them. I use all of them. I’m happy and I get good comments on all of them.”

The elder Yeast said he’s very proud of his son.

“I’m just proud of Nick,” he said. “He’s a hardworking young man. He got his goal set and now he’s doing his thing. Daddy ain’t got no complaints at all. As they say back here, I’m a happy camper.”

The younger Yeast said that he normally lives in San Francisco but, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, he went back to Kentucky to help take care of his parents. He said that he is going to come back “now that California is a bit more open.”

Yeast helped start his business with capital from Working Solutions, a community development financial institution, or CDFI.

Working Solutions provides financial services, such as lending and coaching to people in marginalized communities, such as the LGBTQ community, who might have a tougher time accessing the needed capital to start a business.

Sara Razavi, a lesbian who is the CEO of Working Solutions, told the B.A.R. that Yeast spoke to the team there to find out about marketing and sales.

“We’re a nonprofit financial institution serving the nine Bay Area counties — people left out of the mainstream,” Razavi said. “Nick came to us looking for some startup capital and he sits in the demographic that we seek to be serving, so it made a lot of sense for us to support Nick.”

Working Solutions hooked Yeast up with Small Business Administration funds in the amount of $6,500.

Wells Fargo Bank works with Working Solutions and made a $500,000 investment in the nonprofit.

“It’s an honor to serve business owners like Nick through our relationship with impactful organizations such as Working Solutions,” said Judith Goldkrand, a national women and Asian segments leader with Wells Fargo. “Wells Fargo has a longstanding history of supporting the LGBTQ+ community. We have always felt that we stand stronger together.”

Yeast said he hopes that having fragrances, as opposed to cologne on the one hand or perfume on the other, will help “break the barriers down with gender norms.”

“We have perfume and we have cologne, but it should all be about just being you,” Yeast said. “Our whole life we have people telling us who we are supposed to be, and then we have to find out who we are. At the end of the day, we’re definitely more of a movement than a brand.”

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The producer: Colombia. In the 1980s Colombia became the center of the global cocaine trade, which helped fuel the decades-long conflict between FARC guerillas, drug cartels, paramilitaries, and the Colombian government.

In 2000, Washington and Bogotá inked the multibillion-dollar Plan Colombia, in which the US trained and equipped Colombian soldiers to crush militants and quash the drug trade. To its credit, Plan Colombia helped force the FARC to negotiate a landmark peace deal in 2016 — but there has been no discernable success against drugs. Coca cultivation is near all-time highs, vastly surpassing levels seen even during the heyday of Pablo Escobar. And Colombian authorities are still making record cocaine busts.

The political problem is that the government hasn’t met pledges to help farmers replace coca crops with legal ones. Doing so would mean providing security and economic opportunity in remote regions where the FARC dissolved but narcos filled the vacuum. Instead, the state has focused on US-backed eradication programs: wrecking coca crops either with environmentally-hazardous aerial spraying or, more recently, sending troops in to tear up coca fields, plant by plant. The trouble is, it doesn’t work. Congress found in a 2020 report that eradication has produced “dismal results” — it creates tension between farmers and the state, without diminishing coca cultivation for long.

If the 2016 peace deal is to have any meaning at all, this circle still needs to be squared. In Colombia, the war on drugs is still an obstacle to peace.

The middleman: Mexico. After US feds in the 1980s busted up the Caribbean transit hubs linking Andean producers and American consumers, overland routes through Mexico took off. By one FBI estimate, some 93 percent of drug flows from South America to the US now go via Mexico. These routes are controlled by the murderous and mind-bogglingly well-armed Mexican cartels that effectively run huge swaths of northern Mexico themselves today. Despite some joint US-Mexico successes, like taking down notorious kingpin El Chapo in 2014, the cartels are as powerful as ever.

What’s more, cooperation between the DEA and Mexican officials has broken down under the administration of Mexico’s prickly nationalist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

All of this has contributed to Mexico’s soaring homicide rate, one of the world’s highest. And that’s a big problem for López Obrador. He was elected in 2018 partly on pledges to tackle the violence — but so far his “hugs not bullets” approach has yielded more lead than love.

In sum: the US war on drugs has failed to cut the enemy’s biggest supply chain.

The consumer: the United States. “Just say no,” former US First Lady Nancy Reagan told us. This sizzling egg is your brain on drugs, we learned. And still, decades later, rates of illegal drug use — of all kinds — remains high and rising.

Meanwhile, a raft of laws from the 1980s and 1990s — some written by then-Senator Joe Biden — heavily criminalized drug possession, causing the prison population to explode. That helped to make US incarceration rate the highest in the entire world. Black and Latino Americans have suffered disproportionately: drug convictions are more frequent and sentences harsher than for whites, though drug use rates are similar across racial groups.

But the politics are shifting. More than 80 percent of Americans — of both parties — now say the war on drugs has failed, and two-thirds believe it should end. A big majority favors decriminalization of drug offenses.

So far, more than half of US states have decriminalized small amounts of marijuana for personal consumption, and Oregon has done the same even with harder stuff. One of the thorniest debates now is how to ensure that profits from legal drugs go towards helping the communities of color ravaged for decades by drug enforcement.

And on Tuesday the Biden administration — taking a Trump-era criminal justice reform even further — endorsed an important bill that would finally eliminate disparities in sentencing between powdered cocaine, a more elite drug, and crack, whose generally-poorer (and Blacker) users have suffered harsher punishments for decades.

Still, the US pours billions into drug-oriented law enforcement annually. A drug arrest is made every 23 seconds, activists say. And overdose deaths have more than tripled in the past twenty years amid a raging opioid crisis kickstarted not by distant cartels, but by American drug companies, including those owned by the now-disgraced Sackler family.

The last line (so to speak): After 50 years, the war on drugs has not, by any reasonable standard, been won. Is there a better way? Let us know here

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Updated Jun 23, 2021, 05:16pm EDT

I’m a New Orleans-based news reporter for Forbes covering the U.S. South and breaking news. Previously, I wrote for The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate covering

… Read More

I’m a New Orleans-based news reporter for Forbes covering the U.S. South and breaking news. Previously, I wrote for The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate covering local government.

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Greece, alongside 14 other European Union nations, signed a declaration on Wednesday condemning Hungary’s recent anti-LGBT+ bill which bans the “display and promotion of homosexuality” to those who are under 18 years old.

Greece condemns Hungary’s anti-LGBT+ bill

Hungary’s new legislation bans the teaching or portrayal of homosexuality and transgender issues in school education material and television programs addressed to people under 18 years of age.

The bill has caused domestic and international outrage, which has only been intensified due to the fact that it was passed during Pride month, which is meant to be a time of celebration and liberation for the LGBT+ community.

The EU condemnation was led by Benelux, the politico-economic union between Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Ministers from the three countries discussed the controversial bill before consulting other like-minded countries to gain their support.

The Belgian Deputy Prime Minister issued a tweet on the issue as well.

On the initiative of Belgium and #Benelux, 13 member states send a strong signal against recent anti-#LGBTIQ laws 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️passed in #Hungary and call on @EU_Commission to act. Determined to protect Europe’s values and the rights of ALL ! https://t.co/q4Pp2fe5LY

— Sophie Wilmès (@Sophie_Wilmes) June 22, 2021

Italy did not add its show of support until the end of the meeting, and Greece and Austria both signed the EU initiative the next day.

“(The law) represents a flagrant form of discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity and expression and hence deserves to be condemned. Inclusion, human dignity and equality are core values of our European Union, and we cannot compromise on these principles,” the EU countries said in a statement.

“Stigmatizing LGBTIQ persons constitutes a clear breach of their fundamental right to dignity, as provided for in the EU Charter and international law.”

Miltiadis Varvitsiotis, Greece’s Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs, also spoke on the country’s move to condemn Hungary’s anti-LGBT+ law.

Η Ελλάδα μετά τις ανεπαρκείς εξηγήσεις της Ουγγαρίας στο χθεσινό συμβούλιο Γενικών Υποθέσεων συνυπογράφει την κοινή δήλωση των χωρών που ζητούν δράση της Ε. επιτροπής για τον νόμο που στρέφεται ενάντια στα δικαιώματα της ΛΟΑΤΚΙ κοινότητας. 1/2

— Varvitsiotis Miltiadis (@MVarvitsiotis) June 23, 2021

“If you want to understand the Orban regime, it’s very important to note that, throughout his governance, and particularly in every election period, there is always one enemy,” says MEP Katalin Cseh on the phone from a taxi as she dashes between meetings in Brussels.

“It’s usually a group of people in a minority who are weak, who do not have the same opportunities as the majority and they are singled out. Before this it was the migrants. Now it appears that the LGBTI community is part of the new enemy group.”

Cseh is one of two young women who won seats in the European Parliament for Hungary’s newly-founded liberal, pro-EU Momentum party in 2019, a year of political upsets for the hard-right regime of Viktor Orban that saw the opposition advance in local elections and take the mayoralty of capital Budapest.

Now with national elections approaching in 2022, opinion polls indicate the united opposition is running neck and neck with Orban’s Fidesz party, and Cseh believes the government’s strategy is to stoke fears about gay people in a bid to shore up its political support.

This is the context to a a new law that bans the portrayal of gay people in any content that is deemed to be for people aged under 18. 

Introduced as an amendment to a law on child abuse, the legislation has provoked uproar across western Europe where member states, already exasperated by Orban’s persistent vetoing of European Union statements on international human-rights issues, have rounded on Budapest for what they say is a deliberate move to rouse societal hostility towards LGBT minorities by equating homosexuality with paedophilia.

Ireland has called for the European Commission to take Hungary to court for violating EU norms, and joined 15 member states in condemning the law in a statement that revealed a stark divide between western and eastern Europe on the issue, as a cluster of states around Hungary chose to stay silent.

A showdown is expected as national leaders meet in Brussels this week and the row has even spilled over into the Euro 2020 soccer tournament, as local authorities around Europe declared they would display the rainbow flag in protest at Uefa’s refusal to allow Munich’s stadium to be lit up with the Pride colours for Wednesday night’s Germany-Hungary match.

“For the Hungarian LGBTI communities, it really gives hope to see so much international support in this difficult time,” Cseh says.

In 2020 Hungary was downgraded to no longer be rated as a democracy but rather a “hybrid regime” by the NGO Freedom House, which cited a raft of legal changes that allowed the Orban government to consolidate its control over the country’s independent institutions and suppress the freedom of the media.

EU cash

Orban’s ability to do this, according to Cseh, has been smoothed by EU cash, which she says he has used to enrich a coterie of cronies that in turn support Fidesz. She points to the case of Lorinc Meszaros, a school friend of Orban and a former gas fitter who was awarded a raft of state and EU-funded contracts and now ranks as Hungary’s richest man.

“It’s how Orban maintains his power,” Cseh says.

The MEP points to a laggardly response from other EU states and from the European Commission in the years when Orban began to take his authoritarian turn, and worries that inaction now could encourage his allies in other member states under populist rule.

“This enables I think, other people who feel that the free press is just a nuisance for their government, or believe that they could be better off with more loyal judges,” Cseh says. “This is why we have to be very, very strong in confirming that we are a community, we are not a cash machine.”

She has called on the commission to come down hard on Hungary through infringement procedures, which were initiated in 2018 along with proceedings against Poland for stacking the judiciary, but have stalled since. In addition, she wants the EU to use a new conditionality clause attached to funding, which is designed to withhold cash for countries that infringe the rule of law.

Orban’s strategy is to get what he can from the EU, while limiting the bloc’s power, Cseh believes.

“I think he wants to weaken the EU significantly. He wants to turn back to the idea of pure nation states, and limited economic co-operation between them,” Cseh says.

“I think what he doesn’t understand [is] that a weak EU is bad. Bad for everybody, but particularly for small countries with open economies such as Hungary. Hungary would never be able to influence anything in the global sphere if it wasn’t part of a community 450 million strong.”

LOS ANGELES, June 23, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Enspira, an innovative human resources (HR) consultancy and technology firm, today announced receiving certification as a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Business Enterprise^® (Certified LGBTBE^®) through the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce (NGLCC) Supplier Diversity Initiative. The NGLCC is the business voice of the LGBT community and serves as the nation’s exclusive certifying body for LGBT-owned and operated businesses.

“As a member of the LGBTQ community and Founder and CEO of Enspira, I am proud to see our firm become a Certified LGBTBE through the NGLCC, the largest LGBT economic advocacy and business development organization in the world,” said Kurt Landon. “I have spent much of my career advocating for marginalized communities, and at Enspira, we are committed to making lasting change and work every day with our clients to instill diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) in all aspects of the workplace. Whether providing guidance on DEIB or assisting organizations with their talent and culture needs, as a certified LGBTBE, Enspira is here to help.”

Companies and organizations can engage Enspira for DEIB and other custom HR solutions. With the LGBTBE certification, Enspira can also be the consultancy of choice to help them meet their growing supplier diversity goals and requirements. Over one-third of Fortune 500 companies recognize this certification and partner with NGLCC to create fully LGBT-inclusive supply chains. Enspira brings deep expertise and commitment to DEIB and can serve for-profit and nonprofit organizations of all sizes and industries.

“We are so pleased to welcome Enspira to the ever-expanding network of NGLCC Certified LGBT Business Enterprises and the hundreds of corporations and government agencies eager to put them to work,” said NGLCC Co-Founder and President Justin Nelson and Co-Founder and CEO Chance Mitchell. “According to NGLCC’s groundbreaking America’s LGBT Economy report, America’s estimated 1.4 million LGBT business owners, many of them NGLCC certified, add over $1.7 trillion to the GDP and create tens of thousands of new jobs. We are proud to count Enspira among those who prove every day that LGBT businesses are the future of the American economy.”

About NGLCC
The National LGBT Chamber of Commerce is the business voice of the LGBT community and the largest global not-for-profit advocacy organization specifically dedicated to expanding economic opportunities and advancements for LGBT people. NGLCC is the exclusive certification body for LGBT-owned businesses. www.nglcc.org

NGLCC Media Contact
[email protected]
202.234.9181

About Enspira:
Enspira started with the simple philosophy in mind: deliver fit-for-purpose, client-focused HR solutions that help people be inspired, grow and thrive, so their organization does too. Founded in 2018 by Kurt Landon, Enspira is an innovative and LGBTQ-owned HR consultancy and technology firm headquartered in Southern California, helping clients with their people needs and consistently delivering the most practical and pragmatic ways to implement them within their organizations. Through the combination of its Startup Studio and Innovation Lab, Consulting Services and Technology Solutions business units, Enspira’s winning team of HR experts collectively bring hundreds of years of diverse, cross-industry and global experience. Learn more at enspirahr.com and follow @enspirahr.

SOURCE Enspira