San Diego Gay and Lesbian News

I am an MIT-trained physicist and complexity scientist who studies pandemics. I have warned about global pandemics due to increasing travel for 15 years. I recommended community-based monitoring of symptoms to stop Ebola in West Africa in 2014, and it worked.

Good Morning,

After the recent Tuesday election in which I was reluctantly able to vote in, rather than provisional, as I assumed I would have been required to. Other than my military service, I have NEVER voted by mail in ballot. I always go to the polling station and vote that Election Day, on the day.

Long gone are the times when opinions and allegations were limited to the people in your immediate vicinity.

Back in 2008, in San Diego, during the course of the entire No on 8 campaign, only around 9,000 volunteers took part in the campaign that entire year as we fought to protect our freedom to marry.

One of the challenges organizers faced when trying to recruit volunteers was folks claiming, “California is so progressive. This will never pass in California.” We lost that campaign. 

Before the United Methodist Church (UMC) announced a proposal to split the denomination over “fundamental differences” regarding theological beliefs on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage, that Friday morning of January 3rd, I was on the phone with the Reverend Joel B. Guillemette, pastor of Sudbury UMC.

Free speech is one of the cornerstones of American Democracy. However, what are the boundaries of free speech? In the current political milieu, the protection of free speech appears to have an amorphous and wide expanse when it comes to sexist, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, and xenophobic rants on many social media platforms and college campuses.

Now in a moving memoir, “A Song for You: My Life with Whitney Houston,” by Robyn Crawford depicts their friendship and love story.

Seven years after Whitney's death, Robyn Crawford says, "I'd come to the point where I felt the need to stand up for our friendship. And I felt an urgency to stand up and share the woman behind the incredible talent.”

Sometimes the best way to look at oneself is through a play. Joshua Harmon’s timely and satirical drama “Admissions” is one such production, and it’s now appearing here in Boston.

Halloween is one of America’s favorite yearly activities. Unfortunately, Halloween can be America’s scariest, too - especially for those of us seen as costumes you wear rather than the human beings that we are. Asian Americans, Native Americans, blacks, and Muslim women in burqas, hijabs, and Muslim men in turbans with beards are frequent targets of race-themed costumes.

Black Christians give away forgiveness like it’s confetti, and white Trump evangelicals give it away sparingly, if at all. As an African American, the act of forgiveness appears to be our immediate go-to place in the face of unimaginable racial honor done to us.