San Diego Gay and Lesbian News

Eighteen years ago America changed forever as terrorists commandeered four commercial airliners and purposefully flew them into the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon. The fourth jet was headed to Washington D.C.but crashed into a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers were able to overtake the hijackers. 2,996 people were killed that day, many LGBT people among them. 

(Author’s note: the names of the immigrants described here have been changed to protect their safety.)

I met Juan I and Juan II while they were detained in Otay Mesa Detention Center, a San Diego immigration prison. Both are 20 years old, both are gay. Juan I is from Venezuela. Juan II began his journey north in El Salvador.

A year before the Mayflower arrived in 1620, the first group of enslaved Africans depicted as “20 and odd Negroes” arrived sometime during the final week of August to the Virginia colony of Jamestown. The fact that the exact date cannot be pinpointed assists in obfuscating the origins of slavery in the United States.

 I was sitting in the mid-size meeting room with 3-foot square tables and plastic yellow and red chairs, talking with Oussama, a 28-year-old gay immigration detainee, when a tall-ish, blonde woman in a nice dress and high heels sashayed over to us.

I always have plenty of time to think when I’m visiting at Otay Mesa Detention Center because getting through processing is time-consuming. I’ll spare you all the really boring details, but sitting in a room for 1 to 2 hours without a cell phone is a lesson in patience.

The movie adaptation of the musical Cats dropped a trailer on Thursday and is not getting the respect that the studio wanted I'm pretty sure. It was actually a full trailer and not the hype generating teaser used so often these days to tantalize the audience. I'm thinking the PR department did that anticipating people would love it. Alas, they didn't.

The theme this Pride month is “Looking back, Loving forward. This week leads up to the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots that took place from June 27 to 29, 1969, in the Greenwich Village section of NYC.

The event is well-known because it galvanized LGBTQ+ activist organizations and movements here and abroad.

When you reside at the intersections of multiple identities, anniversaries of your civil rights struggles can be both bitter and sweet. And, May 17th was a reminder.

I'm not afraid of cops. But the white-wash of a report critical of the San Diego Police Department's (SDPD) treatment of transgender people troubles me greatly.

America continues to struggle with its battle against white racism.  However, what’s not addressed is the internalized racism people of color struggle with too - consciously and unconsciously. And, it’s called “colorism” or  “intraracism."