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  • Columns,  Savvy Senior

    The Savvy Senior: Could You Have Diabetes?


    By Jim Miller

    Dear Savvy Senior,

    My brother and his wife, who are ages 60 and 56, were recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and prediabetes, and neither one had a clue. Could I have it too?

    Concerned Sibling 

    Dear Concerned,

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention nearly 115 million Americans have diabetes or prediabetes today, but most of them don’t even know they have it. Here’s how to know if you’re at risk.

  • Columns,  Dave Hughes,  Latest

    Dave Hughes: Senior Housing Needs to Increase Its Diversity Competency

    Dave Hughes of RetireFabulous.com

    Senior Housing Needs to Increase Its Diversity Competency
    Changing Workforce Demographics Signal a Change in Retiree Demographics

    By Dave Hughes

    During their working years, the Baby Boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964) experienced a dramatic environmental shift in workplace demographics and culture. Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, employers have become more attuned to the need to provide workplaces that are more welcoming of career-oriented women and diverse people of all sorts. Corporate America and academia, in particular, implemented policies and training programs which foster inclusion for employees of various races, nationalities, religions, and physical abilities, as well as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) people who want to be able to live and work more openly.

  • Columns,  Savvy Senior

    The Savvy Senior: How to Get Cash For Your Life Insurance Policy


    By Jim Miller

    Dear Savvy Senior,

    I have a life insurance policy that I’ve been paying on for years that I really don’t need any longer. I’ve been thinking about letting it lapse, but I’ve heard that I can actually sell it for a nice payout. What can you tell me about this?

    Interested In Selling

    Dear Interested,

    Selling a life insurance policy, even a term life policy that you don’t want or need any longer – a transaction known as a “life settlement” – has become a popular option among retirees in recent years that could use some extra cash. Here’s how it works.

  • Columns,  Gay Travelers Magazine,  LGBTravel,  Travel

    Gay Travelers Magazine: Vinales Valley, Cuba – Touring the UNESCO World Heritage Site

    This article first appeared at Gay Travelers Magazine, reprinted with Permission

    By Steven Skelley and Thomas Routzong

    On our second trip to explore Cuba, we decided to venture outside Havana to the amazing Vinales Valley. We booked an 11 hour tour called “The Vinales Valley – A UNESCO World Heritage Site” and we discovered a Cuban treasure.

    The Vinales National Park is a Cuban National Monument. More than 90 percent of the property is in the hands of private owners. Thirty percent is owned by individual farmers and another 62 percent is owned by the National Association of Small Farmers. If you want to see the real Cuba, this is the place.

  • Columns,  Stephanie Mott

    Stephanie Mott: The Kansas Republican Party

    Stephanie Mott

    By Stephanie Mott

    And ultimately, an ideology that says you can determine my gender identity is broken and is causing a lot of pain, and that’s why it’s important to bring us back to what we know to be true and good.

    The Kansas Republican Party has lost its mind, and its heart, and its soul. Not that this is news in Kansas right now, rather more of a status quo, but if any doubt still remained, the recently approved resolution on “sexuality” removed any remnants of even the most basic humanity.

    In case you missed it, KRP approved, by voice vote, this resolution completely inaccurate and horribly destructive to transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) Kansans, and then turned around and absurdly proposed it was the product of love.

  • Columns,  Rod Hensel

    Rod Hensel: It’s Time for New York State to Step Up for LGBT Seniors

    Rod Hensel

    By Rod Hensel
    The Gayging Advocate

    Our LGBT seniors who are still out and about and active need to be willing show they know how to post on Facebook and use a phone when election time draws near. We’re not even asking for money, just the right to live with dignity and pride.

    On the west coast, California gets it. Washington state gets it. It’s time for New York State to take a leadership role on the east coast and show they “get it” too.

    The “it” is legislation requiring professional caregivers — especially those in nursing homes and senior housing facilities — to take a course on the special needs of LGBT seniors so their charges can be out, open and comfortable in their senior years.

    You can call it “cultural competency” or “sensitivity training” or whatever you wish, but the fact is LGBT people of my generation are scared to just be themselves and are going back into the closet in their autumn years.

  • Columns,  One Thing or Another

    One Thing or Another: The Kids Are Not All Right

    It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

    By Mark McNease

    Imagine the despair young people feel today. Imagine the frustration at being governed by the old who ignore their fears, anxieties, terrors, hopes, dreams and concerns …

    Not long ago I was among those crusty older people who bemoaned and occasionally belittled younger generations for effectively forgetting I’d existed. As a sixty-year-old man (I tend to round up), I was embittered to know so many people even a decade younger did not share my memories of the devastation of AIDS, of my government’s indifference to that plague, of Madonna’s performance in a wedding dress at the Grammys, or of the celebration in the streets of West Hollywood following Bill Clinton’s election. It was, I insisted, a matter of preserving history, without admitting it was as much my personal history I wanted preserved as that of my country or tribe.

  • Columns

    Column: The changing landscape of the LGBT family

    By David Webb The Rare Reporter What a difference a few decades and the evolution of new generations can make in society, particularly when it comes to the development of a new community. When I first moved to Dallas in the summer of 1969 — just a few months short of my 21st birthday — I found a community of people that heretofore I had only read about in literature. It was by accident that I landed in Oak Lawn because I just as easily could have rented my first apartment in any other area of the city. As I started navigating the neighborhood, going to the grocery store and going about the other mundane aspects of my life, I began noticing some very interesting people. It wasn’t long before I realized that I had stumbled upon something new and exciting. The LGBT community as we know it today was in its infancy. There were a few gay men’s bars, at least one lesbian hangout, some drag shows, cliques of gay people working at downtown department stores and hippy festivals in Lee Park where LGBT people celebrated openly with young, liberal straight people. In those days, I didn’t see a lot of same-sex couples living together. I occasionally became aware of older same-sex couples who had lived together for long times in homes, but for the most part I only met other single people like myself living in apartments. There were a lot of people living together as roommates, but from what I could tell there were few commitments in these arrangements. It was the days of indiscriminate sexual activity that was being practiced by gay and straight people alike. I did quickly find a place for myself in the community, and I became a part of a family of gay and straight people who socialized together. There were a couple of married straight people in the group, a divorced woman with a child, several gay and straight men and other people who drifted in and out of the network over the years.
    This was a time when people realizing they were gay often chose not to reveal it to their birth families. Many people who felt isolated developed relationships with groups of people who gave them the support they needed to recognize and accept who and what they were. Many other groups of people that I encountered seemed to consist primarily of families of gay men or lesbians. It seemed to me that lesbians tended to be more likely to couple than gay men at that time. I was unaware of any same-sex couples raising children in the early 1970s. That early model of friends-as-family was one that served me well, and for some reason I’ve never much wanted to become involved in a committed relationship with a partner. Despite a couple of half-hearted tries over the years, that still holds true for me today. But it has changed drastically for many other people since the launch of the gay rights movement with the Stonewall Rebellion in New York City in 1969.
    Legal challenges to state laws restricting marriage to heterosexuals began in the early 1970s and the fight for marriage equality has progressed to the point that same-sex marriage is legal in six states and the District of Columbia in the country now. Information gleaned in part from the 2000 U.S. Census and published by the Williams Institute in “Census Snapshot” in December 2007, reveals that an estimated 8.8 million LGBT lived in the U.S. in 2005. In 2005, there were 776,943 same-sex couples in the U.S., compared to 594,391 in 2000, according to the report. The Census information makes it clear that LGBT people live in every county in the U.S., whereas in the early years openly gay people seemed to be mostly a big-city phenomenon. Of these same-sex couples living in the U.S., 20 percent were raising children under the age of 18, and an estimated 270,313 of the U.S.’s children were living in same-sex-couple households, according to the report. An estimated 65,000 of the U.S.’s adopted children reportedly lived with a lesbian or gay parent. Clearly in the 40-plus years since the start of the gay rights movement, all of the characteristics of LGBT life have changed dramatically. Young people are often quicker to acknowledge and accept their sexual orientation, and there is a whole array of options that were unavailable to previous generations of LGBT people. When young LGBT people think about their lives and relationships today, it’s probably in terms of dating, finding the right person, living together, getting married and even raising children. If anyone had told me 40 years ago that I would see such developments in my lifetime, I would have thought they were crazy. But that’s how it is today, and it makes me wonder what sort of decisions I might have made about my life if so much had been available to me when I was young. David Webb is a veteran journalist who has covered LGBT issues for the mainstream and alternative media for three decades. E-mail him at davidwaynewebb@yahoo.com.]]>

  • Columns

    Kjoy's Life in the Sr Lane: What's the etiquette on that?

    Kimberly “Kjoy” Ferren

    Of all groups on this planet, I did not expect that the lgbt community, especially the gay boys, would need an etiquette book, but apparently we do – at least according to Steven Petrow, aka Mr. Gay & Lesbian Manners. He’s even written a book about it. Who knew we didn’t know how to come out or ask for a date , or… wait a second, come to think of it, all of this was a near disaster when I came out. Okay. A “self help” book/site for young lgbt’s seems appropriate. But do the seasoned among us need this? It got me thinking about all the faux pas I’ve committed over the years. God/esses, there have been some doozies! And who better to correct our mis-directions then a gay man. Sorry ladies, but overall unless you grew up in high society, we lesbians, especially when we first come out, are a bit lost on etiquette of lgbt-isms and the like. We tend to go right for the more radical side of our history: stop shaving, cut our hair militantly, no bras (don’t we regret that now that they’ve taken a downward slope!); live on brown rice, and eat from plates made on a potter’s wheel. Those were the days! For me things were a bit different growing-up. I was lucky. I had a mom who appreciated manners and we traveled the world so we saw all sorts of social settings. The reason manners mattered was that my mom was literally raised a “holler” in the backwoods coal-mining area of southwest West Virginia. It was a true (unfortunately) ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ story (and worse). But my grandmother believed that just because they were poor country folk didn’t mean they had to be uncivilized. That attitude was forwarded on and she would take me, my brother, and some neighbor kids, out to dinner once a month to learn proper etiquette. That also meant I had to wear a dress! How she loved turning her tomboy into a girlie-girl whenever possible, so maybe these lessons had an ulterior motive. Anyway, there we’d go to the Camelot Smorgasbord all dressed up, and from the time we got to the car to the time we got home we were to do be gentle ladies and men. I wanted to wear my brother’s tie, but that was not going to happen (I sure did in college though!). At least I had cool shiny black patent-leather shoes. Flash forward. When I came out at 19 I was blessed to find my lesbian mothers, Diane and Cece. What this meant was this couple took me under their wing and brought me into lgbt society. Actually they threw me into the fire, for Diane was an uber-lesbian in Los Angeles, a feminist wonder-woman fighting for women’s rights, lgbt rights, renter’s rights, hell everyone’s rights! Next thing I knew I was sitting at a table with then Mayor Tom Bradley, petrified someone would ask me ANY question. All I could think of was, ‘at least know which fork to use’ (thanks mom!). These two lovelies took me everywhere, brought me into the lgbt world amongst older (sexy!) womyn, and eventually I found my voice and my own radicalism through to proper adulthood. They were so proud, and still are. So I guess it’s not so crazy there is a website & book to help coming-outter’s (young & seasoned), or for straights to get it right about lgbt society (“straight talk”). We all need an etiquette connection in life, and though as a lesbian it pains me to say, outside of our moms, it’s usually a gay man.]]>

  • Columns

    U.N. resolution underscores dangers for LGBT people around the globe

    By David Webb – The Rare Reporter The passage of a resolution by the United Nations Human Rights Council last month declaring that LGBT people around the world should be afforded equal protections with all other human beings left me overjoyed, yet still full of consternation. The measure’s passage represented a great victory for human rights advocates who pressed for it, but the very need for such an action underscored how dangerous it is to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender in many parts of the world, including the United States of America. Homosexuality remains illegal in 76 of the globe’s countries, and it is punishable by death in five of them. In the United States, where the nation’s sodomy laws were struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003, discrimination and violence against LGBT people continues to run rampant. An analysis of 14 years of FBI hate crime data by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project in late 2010 revealed that LGBT people are more than twice as likely to be violently attacked as Jews and blacks, more than four times as likely as Muslims and 14 times as likely as Latinos. In a press release by the U.S. Department of State, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the U.N. resolution a “historic moment to highlight the human rights abuses and violations that LGBT people face around the world based solely on whom they are and whom they love.” She noted that torture, rape, criminal proceedings and killings are sanctioned all over the world by religions that condemn anyone who does not adhere to traditional heterosexual norms regarding sexual orientation and gender identity. The controversial resolution, which was proposed by South Africa, passed narrowly on a vote of 23 to 19. Although the measure was supported by the U.S. and other Western countries, it was opposed by African and Arab countries where the prosecution and persecution of LGBT individuals is the most severe. Three countries, including China, abstained from voting. Reaction to the U.N. resolution from opponents of LGBT rights was telling. Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s representative to the Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva, denounced it as a maneuver in an international agenda to restrict the freedom of churches. Tomasi claimed the church opposes violence against homosexual behavior and punishment based on a person’s “feelings and thoughts,” but he condemned the measure as detrimental to society and likened laws against homosexuality to prohibitions against incest, pedophilia and rape. In Ghana, the Rev. Joseph Bosoma of the Sunyani Central Ebenezer Presbyterian Church called on President John Evans Atta Mills to crack down on homosexuality in the country, warning that society was on the verge of a punishment similar to what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah in Biblical times. The president assured the pastor that the government would take action to check homosexual activity. Similarly, Alex McFarland of the American Family Association, the group that is sponsoring Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s The Response Prayer Rally in Houston on Aug. 6, declared recently that the world is now in The Latter Days, in response to the passage of marriage equality in New York. He argued that LGBT rights are not the equivalent of human rights. Soulforce, an LGBT group that monitors conservative religious groups, noted that another host of Perry’s rally, Lou Engle, the leader of The Call, is one of three evangelical leaders in the U.S. who supported the Kill the Gays bill in Uganda. For three decades the greatest impediment to the LGBT rights movement has been Christian Rights groups and its leaders who have seized on the concept of a “homosexual agenda” bent on destroying American culture and society. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, declared the fight against LGBT rights as a “second civil war.” Some of these Christian Rights groups have earned the distinction of being identified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center because they have resorted to crude name-calling and spreading false information about LGBT people in an effort to draw support to their cause. Like the Ku Klux Klan that vilified all minorities in its terroristic oppression of people and also operated under the guise of Christianity, today’s militant Christian Rights groups target LGBT people for scapegoating. LGBT people comprise the last minority group left that it is politically correct in some quarters to attack, and Christian Rights groups and politicians like Gov. Perry are making the most of it. The beginning of this summer marked the 16th anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention’s apology to black people for its abominable treatment of that race over the years, and some gay activists, such as Wayne Besen of Truth Wins Out, petitioned the church group to issue a similar apology to LGBT people. That, of course, did not happen, but one day perhaps it will. Until groups like the Southern Baptist Convention, which urges followers to “go the extra mile when witnessing to gay people” recognizes LGBT people as equal, freedom will continue to be a worldwide challenge. The U.N. resolution was a milestone in that journey to equality, but the road ahead for LGBT people will continue to be a long and difficult one. The U.S., which admittedly is far behind some countries, will likely see success long before LGBT people in some parts of the world feel free. David Webb is a veteran journalist who has covered LGBT issues for the mainstream and alternative media for three decades. E-mail him at davidwaynewebb@yahoo.com.]]>

  • Columns,  Stephanie Mott

    Column: Trans-Feelings

    By Stephanie Mott I started taking hormones in October, 2006. The first few weeks (after the first two weeks) were so full of feelings. Feelings I had suppressed forever, exploding like water bursting through a broken dam. Feelings I never experienced before, emerging like tender buds, exposing themselves to the sunlight, and offering a curious suggestion of the flowers preparing to blossom. As time passed, I began to understand a little about what they meant to me, and about me. Each a tiny clue about who I’ve been, who I am, and who I might become. Each a veiled hint as to my dreams, my values, and my fears. Each revealing another secret, multi-dimensional puzzle piece of my soul. The struggle of having brand new “fifteen-year-old” feelings as a “fifty-something” woman, yields itself to the amazing awakening to that which has always been. The sadness of not being the little girl, is lessened by the discovery of the woman. The truth cries. At its own inherent beauty. For the lost lifetime of illusion. And from the instant certainty that it can never again be taken away. Still, new feelings reveal themselves from time to time. The most common, the most powerful, and the most amazing feelings are about love. I had no idea. For each of the parts of me, is a corresponding need. There are far more love feelings than I could have ever imagined. Here are just a few. Maternal love. As I arrive home from grocery shopping, and the young man from next door is mowing my grass, and I am overwhelmed by the quite unexpected need to make him a sandwich and give him a glass of milk. As a young woman enters my life, looking for someone to help her find herself again, and looking to me.
    A daughter’s love for her mother. Impossible. She died in 1989. But God gave me a new mom. And I am her daughter. Don’t tell me there isn’t a miracle happening here.
    Sisterly love. The nuances of sorority are nothing like the “facts” of fraternity. I finally belong to the place where I am – no longer a “misfit in the land of lost toys”, as Toni, one of my many amazing new sisters, would say. Physical love. Sometimes I am near some guy and I get feelings in places I don’t even have yet! OMG. Romantic love. I place my comparatively small hand in his, and a different feeling of correctness travels throughout me. He becomes a part of every thought, as though I have become more, without losing me in the process. He compliments my womanhood, my personhood. To steal (and amend) a line from the movie, As Good As It Gets, he “makes me want to be a better woman.” As years have now gone by, I find that truly understanding my feelings is just another of the multitude of unsolved riddles of life, generally summed up in the one-word question, “Why?” And in its place, comes the understanding that time spent asking is time spent not living. And living is the gift. The spoils of war, as it were. The battle done. Now comes the feeling most pervasive to my existence, wholly unwilling to allow the battlefield to prepare for yet another victim. The struggles are senseless, in that they should never have happened. You will not swallow one more child as I stand silent. As you purposefully destroy soul after soul in some misguided quest to bring light to the darkness, you bring darkness to the light. Your path, from this moment forward, will be required to go through me – and millions like me – all of us feeling the same feelings. It is not anger. It is far more powerful than anger. It is truth. It is justice. It is equality. It is freedom. It is time. It has been said, “to feel is to be alive”. For some, when the feelings are ones of hopelessness, to feel is to die. The most memorable feelings of my life today are these. The feeling of realizing I was not alone – it was possible for me to transition. The feeling of seeing myself in the mirror. And the feeling of knowing I can make a difference. However, in the final analysis, nothing compares to the feeling of feeling without fear – the feeling of the freedom to be me. Stephanie’s columns can also be found at Liberty Press. Stephanie Mott is executive director of the Kansas Statewide Transgender Education Project and a member of the Board of Directors at Metropolitan Community Church of Topeka She can be reached at stephanie.mott@k-step.org or stephaniem@mcctopeka.org ]]>

  • Columns

    Rick Rose: Living to tell – the welcome demise of "DADT"

    There was new-found freedom across the world last Thursday as gay U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan shouted with exhilaration that a federal appeals court order the day before here in the states officially stopped enforcement of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, putting our community members who are in the U.S. military one big step closer to revealing our sexual orientation without fear of retribution or dismissal. In legal terms, it’s been a long time coming as the Pentagon was told on the Wednesday after the 4th of July 2011 to cease investigations and discharges of service members in violation of the ban on gays serving openly in our military. The Defense Department will comply with the court order and took steps that very day to begin informing military forces of the change. This milestone event was outlined in the law passed in December 2010 which also requires that every man and woman serving in U.S. military uniform to complete training courses about the end of the policy. The wimpy Clinton “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which began in late 1993, will officially end 60 days after our fearless President Obama’s written certification that such courses are ready to be implemented. Let freedom ring…and let everyone hear, loud and queer, from shore to shore! “I’m ecstatic,” said one soldier stationed in Baghdad who joined other gay soldiers on Thursday night at a military coffee shop to celebrate. Meanwhile, in the steam room at my local YMCA near Barskdale AFB in Bossier City, LA, following our workouts, a young reservist expressed his freedom in a different way. Flashing a beautiful, pearly white smile through the hazy steam, he asked me, “Are towels required in here?” I answered judiciously and with no self interest, “Not required.” He left the room, hung his wet towel outside the door, and returned, flashing that same smile. Triggered by his question, I could sense he wasn’t from here as I opened up a refreshing conversation asking him if he was visiting.
    He told me he was in the AF for a year, then revealed to his superiors that having a college education was more important. He requested and was given the opportunity to pursue his future and switch to being in the reserves during his college studies. He told me he was from a long lineage of military family, and introduced himself as Rich as he extended a firm handshake. Seeing my short crew cut, Rich asked if I was military. I explained that while my father and brother were Marines, it wasn’t right for me. There was silence. Immediately, the thought “don’t ask, don’t tell” crossed my mind in its new light, and I knew it was safe to move the conversation forward in a matter that I am certain would not have happened just a week before. The next night, I met another young reservist while at the local arts theatre, the Robinson Film Center. We hit it off, so I invited him back to my place to continue our conversation. “I’m new to all this,” 21 year old Joe said. “I love women, but I really like the feeling of being with a man. I really want to explore this all. It feels good; it feels right!” I had well over a quarter of a century of newness on Joe, having had my first man on man sexual experience at 18 years old, and comfortably shared those experiences with him. Over these last couple ensuing days, I embarked on several edifying conversations with my friends, most older like me; many, military wives; some gay, some straight. Not one of us thought about the power banning this policy would have on lives such as Rich’s and Joe’s. Up til now, these fine young men just starting their adult lives could have lost their livelihood, their income, their career, their education, their housing, their way of life for expressing their feelings and simply telling me who they were should I have not kept what once was their secret, but no longer holds any power. Their simple, honest, truthful behaviors now rang of freedom, not fear…and they could be who they are…proud members of the U.S. military, by choice, and proud members of the LGBT community, by birth. As the days pass by and we head to full transparency in the military, LGBT, U.S. and world communities, optimism will rise as we realize how stupid, silly and senseless DADT was. Today I read a quote from an Air Force staff sergeant at Bagram who quoted his commander, “Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t care, doesn’t matter. We have a war to fight that is much more important.” We all have another war to fight and win. In their ruling last Wednesday, the three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, noted that the Obama administration has said it thinks another federal law and Clinton monstrosity — the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriages — is unconstitutional. Fly your flag high and fight the fight. Freedom will ring louder and queerer, still. It starts with Barack and Andrew…Rich and Joe…me and you. -Rick]]>