OFFICIAL RELEASE August 3, 2007
 
EqualityMySpace Founder steps down, new Director announced

Tully Satre, 18, the founder and visionary for EqualityMySpace, has stepped down as Director of the more than 12,000 member lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) web-based support, education and advocacy group. Satre will begin study this fall at Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University.

The new Director is North Carolina-native and LGBTQ youth activist and advocate Matt Comer. Comer, 21, is widely known across the State of North Carolina and throughout the national "blogosphere" as an "articulate advocate on LGBT issues" and as a powerful youth, grassroots activist.

In July, EqualityMySpace also welcomed a new team member. Delia Rimer of New York won the EqualityMySpace Pride Month writing contest and became the second contributor on the EqualityMySpace Blog.

EqualityMySpace was started in August 2007 as a part of The Voice Project (TVP), which was started by Satre to provide a powerful and visible online presence for offering support, education, awareness and empowerment primarily to LGBTQ youth.

EqualityMySpace is an international networking profile committed to the advocacy for equal rights for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, (GLBT) questioning and straight community united for the cause of equality. The group fosters a freindly network for GLBT people and their friends online. The group also offers a regularly updated "blog" featuring the group's Director and fellow EqualityMySpace members.

EqualityMySpace is one of the largest networking sites available internationally to reach out to people in need of support, and bring together the number of people that support equality for LGBTQ people.

More information can be found at http://www.myspace.com/equalitymyspace or by emailing the Director at matt@interstateq.com.

Hononegah panel: No Gay Straight Alliance
The School Board will have to vote on the 5-2 recommendation, which could hit legal hurdles.

By Rob Baxter
ROCKFORD REGISTER STAR

ROCKTON — The Hononegah School Board's co-curricular committee decided Monday night not to support the formation of a Gay Straight Alliance Club at the high school. It plans to recommend to the full School Board that it vote against the proposal when it meets in August.

The committee's decision came in the face of tremendous community opposition to the proposal. The committee met three times on the issue in recent weeks but could not decide.

About 200 people packed half of the Hononegah High School library as the board listened to emotional pleas for and against the proposal. English teacher Catherine Aubrecht made the suggestion for the club on behalf of students.

READ THE REST - Rockford Register Star

From Matthew Lucas, IQN Editor:

Greetings.

I was debating what this next post should be about, and I thought hey, why not gender? It ties into pretty much everything. After all, as soon as we're born what question is asked -- boy or girl? And that label sticks with us for the rest of our lives, and if we decide it doesn't fit us, well, then we have to start from scratch. Recently I've been thinking more and more about how we think of ourselves and how we want others to see us.

Even on good ol' MySpace there's only two options for gender and ya have to choose just one. Kinda messed up, right? I mean, as far as occupations go, you can have the same job title as someone else, but have different responsibilities. Conversely, you can have a different title, but have the same responsibilities. If you can write in what you do for a living, why not be able to write in what you identify with in terms of gender?

There's also the fact that on here you can choose from gay/straight/bi/unsure/no answer in the sexual orientation dept., but that isn't broad enough either. But that's another argument for another time.

Tonight it's gender, which is tricky because it's so often connected with sexuality, yet it's a completely different thing.

Unfortunately, life is too short and people are too close-minded to fully separate gender from sexuality. I'm totally guilty of this – which sucks, because I know I don't like it when people to assume, oh well, if this person is feminine s/he must like dudes and if this person is masculine s/he must like chicks. Yet I know I do it; I see a feminine woman and I'm like, oh, too bad, Deals, this lady likes c*ck. But obvi she could very well like girls.

Perhaps the more unsure we are of ourselves, the more difficult it is for us to not label others.

I realize part of me has always identified more as being "male," but how much of that is simply cuz I like girls? How much does sexuality play into that? Do I want to give off a more male vibe to send a signal that I am attracted to women and perhaps (if they're in touch with their sexuality/gaydar) they'll pick up on it? Or is it just, hey I am a dude. Guys who are biologically male don't need to go around reminding girls that they're men, or do they?

OK, well I guess I totally went into the sexuality/gender connection, so uhh, yeah. My bad.

Long story (hopefully) short, I got a haircut recently, a kinda fauxhawk dealy with the sides shaved pretty close. My hair wasn't that long to begin with, but now there's no doubt it's super-short, and dare I use the b word – butch (although "bad" might also fit as a few peeps asked if I cut the hair myself. Thanks, guys). Anyway, I got my haircut and as soon as the barber shaved off the first part I instantly felt so much better. I'd shaved my head in the past, but for whatever reason I always ended up growing it out again. Was there some self-hating "I can be kinda girly, too" thought racing through my not-so-subconscious? Sure. Do I get some kind of pleasure with people not necessarily knowing I'm queer when they meet me (because in my hypocritical world every woman with shot hair must be gay)? Yeah. Is it because on some level I'm ashamed? I certainly hope not, but I feel there is a freedom to people not knowing and not making assumptions.

In the three weeks since I've shaved my head I have felt so much more free. May it be known though that I also have not packed. I've blogged a bit in the past about my adventures in packing. But to catch you up in the "WTF does Deals have in her pants dept." Occasionally I soft pack. A soft pack is made of a material called "softskin" and ya stick in your pants; it's a… uh, package. Yeah, a cock and balls. It's awesome. I have a medium sized one and I'm immensely proud of it. I've worn it to work, doing stand up, improv, going out, you know, it goes wherever I go, kinda like a My Buddy/Kid Sister if you will.

Sometimes my soft pack is easy to see, other times not so much. When I first started wearing it I was really paranoid, but after the first few times I got to be like, Yeah, I got a dick… JEALOUS? And it's super awesome when random dudes on the street would pass me, look at my chest and be like, "Heyyyy!" then look down and be like, 'Wait a second…!" Oh yes, dude, oh yes. You got turned on by a chick with a dick. Deal with it.

Thing is, I have not packed since I got my haircut. I was talking to the pizzaman (my therapist) about this and I was like, well duh, I guess it's like, I pack to show/feel more masculine in a way and now that I got a bald-a$$ head, it's not really as pertinent. This kinda blows though, doesn't it? Obviously gender is more than just one or the other, and we're all a bit of both right? Cuz I've met dudes (straight dudes) who were totally more stereotypically feminine than, like, Princess Di. Yet they're still men and identify as such.

My question is: do we – as a society (not me, cuz we all know I can't stop yapping about it) -- analyze gender too much? Is it something that is better left alone? If so, how the hell do we do it? I know I'm often caught between trying to express just how dude-like I feel on the inside with how I want the rest of the world to see me. Instead of figuring out which steps need to be taken for my outward/physical appearance to match my internal feelings of masculinity, should I just like wake up and do whatever I need to do instead of thinking how many dick points I'll get for each action? Short haircut – 10 points, t-shirt & jeans – 5 points, baseball cap – 7 points, fake wiener – 20 points. And who is keeping track of these points anyway? I'm kind of a nut for putting it out there right now. Even using words and numbers to describe feelings that are just… feelings and nothing more or less.

But how else can we talk about it?

Any of you feel this way? Certainly when we meet people and get to know them, we stop labeling them in terms of age, race, gender, sexual orientation, they are friends, co-workers, family, etc, and that's that. "This is my friend, Rufus." He's *Rufus.* Not the 38 year old bisexual, Hispanic man. If we can be so blind for our friends, why aren't we so blind with ourselves? Are we afraid of how we're going to be seen by our peers?

I've been out for years, but there still must be something in me if I want people to even question what gender I am. Or am I putting too much thought into this? If I like packing, then that should be all.

Gender is always fluid though, and one thing I freak out about is my wedding day (and yeah I have issues with marriage – but we'll put that on hold). But anyway, so if I do get married one day to a hot chick or super-femmy hot dude, like, what if I wake up that morning and decide I wanna wear a dress? I mean, it's possible. I usually wake up feeling like a cross between both genders, but sometimes I just feel like a straight-up dude and I wish my boobs were, like, not there. But gender for me changes everyday, so I'm not gonna go ahead and remove them, cuz the next day I could actually be like, oh sweet I got a nice rack. Huh.

Ok so I got a bit off-track here. But I'm really interested to hear from everyone your thoughts on gender and how you think we can simultaneously give it more/less gravity. It should definitely be studied/discussed more, but also not thought of as being so invariable. How can we go about doing just that?


xoxo,
Delia

myspace.com/djrimer

Hi everyone! I'm Delia, I'll be contributing to the EqualityMySpace blog and I'm super stoked.

I'll start off with a bit about myself. I live in New York, I'm originally from the Bay Area, but moved around a bit growing up. I like falafel, I hate my job, and I think that even though the political climate in this country is right now the, like, epitome of all that is evil and corrupt, huge strides have been made for the queer community in recent years and things are on the up and up.

I came out when I was 16. It was the summer of 1997, and a few months prior, in the spring of my junior year, I'd started a Gay/Straight alliance at my high school in El Cerrito, CA, with my buddy, Mathew. At the time I wasn't sure of what I was, I knew I liked guys growing up, but I that fall I was perplexed as to why I'd spend the bulk of our 90-minute French class fantasizing about kissing the neck of the girl who sat in front of me. I put this all down to boredom and my short attention span. I mean, after all, if I sat in the first row I probably would have just fantasized about kissing the chalkboard, right? Right.

For reasons that are still unclear to me (maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me something) I decided to start a GSA. These days I consider myself to be a pretty shy person, but in high school I was much worse. I knew I wanted to get this thing off the ground, so I enlisted Mathew's help. Problem was, he was probably even shier than me, but he was incredibly supportive, and had he not been there, I know it would have been very difficult for me to follow through.

How does one advertise for a GSA? Well, in our case, passive aggressively. Our method of action was to strike while everyone was sleeping. On a Sunday we went around the school and put flyers up – in the building, outside, by the gym, on the sad little portables, anywhere there was a wall there was a GSA flyer. We even put one up by the Pit – the area where the jocks/popular/(insert derogatory-group-name-from-a-nerd's-POV here) kids hung out. Hey, why not? Even though the odds were the flyers would be torn down before we even taped them up – I figured even popular jerkoffs can be gay, too.

Memories of high school are selective; the only thing I remember from pre-calculus class (aside from our teacher telling us how he lost ¼ of his pinky in a bike spoke) was Monday mornings getting up the nerve to give the dude who did morning announcements a scratch of paper with the location and time of the next GSA meeting.

I'd breathe a sigh of relief every time he read it on the air at the beginning of second period. I always looked around, waiting for the snickering to start. And even though looking back, the mention of the group's formation had no more of a right to be picked on than, say, the Black Student Union, Asian Student Union, or even the ill-fated Irish Student Union, I'd still waited with bated breath for the epithets to come flying. My fear was so loud in my head, I can't quite recall if anything negative ever was said. But I remember the intensity of my fear during those moments.

At the first meeting the group was on the tiny side – I think it was Mathew, me, and two of our good friends, Emily & Josh, with whom we went on daily Taco Bell runs. In our way we already were a gay/straight alliance, but now our powers could be used for opening people's minds and conquering ignorance, instead of just, like, eating piles of tacos and burritos (which although comes in a close second, isn't quite as significant).

As time went on more folks began to trickle in. I've never been much of a leader, so all I was really comfortable with doing was popping the latest episode of Ellen in VCR as if somehow her stoicism and confidence would transfer over to me through the alpha waves.

The morning announcements continued, and my Ray Kinsellian belief that if you build it they will come eventually came true. Sure enough, within weeks people began to trickle in, some of whom took the reins and helped get speakers (students from other schools) to come by and share their stories and answer questions.

I thought a good way of getting fellow students to come in to see the speakers would be to offer free lunch. Because, hell, even I'd go to a McCain rally if he was handing out tofu dogs. Well, not really. But anyway, I spent about a hundred bucks and had pizzas delivered for our meeting. The morning announcements that week hit the airwaves and thousands upon thousands (ok, about 50) students came flocking for the free pizza. The speakers were a chick and dude from Berkeley High who were kind enough to stop by and to this day I can't express how grateful I was for their presence.

In the Q & A the woman said something to the likes of "Yeah, just cuz I like chicks doesn't mean I can't look at a man and know he's physically attractive." And the thought had never occurred to me. Huh, no sh*t, I thought, that's what I've been feeling for 10 years.

The dude, Steven, spoke about how he…well, was attracted to dudes. Upon hearing this, a few of the people who came to the meeting and were (surprise, surprise) not the most open-minded students, were baffled. As they crammed slice after slice of pizza down their mouths their insightful questions flowed like Gatorade in what I'm assuming would be their idea of a post-football game Heaven. "So what you're telling me is even if you see a girl, who's, like, thick, ya wouldn't wanna do her?"

"Uh…no." Steven replied.

"That sh*t is WEAK!" the pizza-fiends retorted.

I, of course, wasn't what you would call "with it," and didn't really know what this kid meant by the word "thick," but I knew where he was coming from.

I was pissed that these kids had come just to eat the pizza and bully the speakers, but maybe some of what they heard ended up sinking in. Or maybe they were total closet cases who *told* themselves they were coming in just for the pizza. I dunno. Pizza holds magical powers and makes people do strange things. To get the most homophobic kids in the school to have lunch in the same room as (*gasp*) homosexuals, well that's some pretty powerful stuff.

As a way of reaching out to the students who did not come to the meetings (for one reason or another) a few of us went around to all of the classrooms and gave a brief presentation with stats (1 in 10 people are queer, queer kids are 3 times as likely to attempt suicide than their hetero counterparts, 28% of queer youth drop out of high school because of discomfort, etc.)

The "1 in 10 people are queer" statistic inspired one class to go around the room counting off every tenth kid, thereby labeling him or her a "homo." These were good times. At least they took into account the plenitude and randomness of who could be gay.

All in all though, things went well with the club. So much so, that the worst thing I can recall (and there may have been more, I've selectively blocked out a good chunk of events that took place in my life before 1998), was just kids asking us straight up if we were gay.

This happened once when I was in a classroom with Emily, who like Mathew & Josh identified as straight. Emily was awesome and immediately replied, "Why does it matter?" But it did matter because, well, afterwards I got so pissed I kicked a trashcan really hard and Emily had to calm me down. OK, not the most bada$$ behavior, but I was really upset. Somehow between wanting to tell everyone to celebrate diversity and there are queers among us, the concept of being questioned point blank rubbed me the wrong way. Then again, just today one girl who was coming to look at a room for rent in our apartment shot off a list of questions: Is there a laundromat nearby? Where is the closest subway? Are you straight? I was like, uh whaaaat? But that's another story for another time.

Anyway, starting the GSA was a cool experience and I'm incredibly fortunate to have had (and still have) such amazing allies and to have lived (and still do) in an area where although there was homophobia, and I was scared, in retrospect it was a safe enough environment for these events to occur without any violence.

There are other stories to tell, but as this blog entry was just gonna be a paragraph of "Hey dudes what's up, I'm Deals", so I shall stop here.

So please feel free to write me, ask questions, I'll write about just about anything. Subscribe to this blog if you haven't already and add me as a friend and check out my other blog. It's the bees knees. Oh! Check out the top friends I have on my page – they're all amazing groups.

Thank you for reading.

Til next time…
D

http://www.myspace.com/djrimer

Hey ya'll... Just wanted to very quickly let you know that I'll be leaving here shortly to go to New York. I'll be gone for two weeks working with the SoulforceQ Right to Marry Campaign so my posting on here will probably be sparse. I'm sure Delia will take up the slack for me, haha. Thanks ya'll.

~ Matt

After a week of voting, with a total of 111 votes, the results are finally in on the EqualityMySpace Blog Pride Contest!

THE RESULTS:

Story One - Angela Blasi - 1%

Story Two - Brenda Burrows - 1%

Story Three - Jeremiah Mills-Osbourne - 32%

Story Four - Delia Rimer - 50%

Story Five - Morgan Willis - 16%

THE WINNER OF THE EQUALITYMYSPACE BLOG PRIDE CONTEST and the new contributor to the blog is Delia Rimer, coming in with the most votes at 50% of all votes counted as of 11:59pm Eastern Standard Time, USA, on July 12, 2007.

Delia will be contacted to see if she is still interested in having the position as a new contributor of the blog. If Delia concedes her position, the runner-up, Jeremiah Mills-Osbourne, will become the new contributor.

I want to thank all of the individuals who submitted stories in the contest. The writing talent and creativity of all the entrants was absolutely amazing. Our EqualityMySpace community has a lot to be proud of!

Today is the last day to vote in the Equality MySpace Blog Pride Contest.

Five Stories... Five People... Your Votes... And one will become a new contributor on the Equality MySpace Blog.

Click Here to read the stories and VOTE!