First and foremost, keep an eye here for what Rachel’s up to. I aim to stay as involved as possible, though as yet have no way to make to the March on Washington. If the opportunity presents itself, though, I will absolutely be there. In the meantime, I aim to be writing, posting, and otherwise causing ruckus.

Okay, next order of business.

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Oh man, you people are great! As I write this, you helped me raise $230 in ONE day. That’s at least two seat on our bus for someone to be able to stand up for their rights! I would love to get to $300 before my meeting at 7 pm, but my goal today is to get the Red Eye to answer my direct message to them about the JTI Chicago planning & the fact that Cleve Jones is coming into town to speak for us. I am on the outreach committee and what better way to reach the public than the Red Eye!

Here’s what I would like from you guys. I want to get Red Eye’s attention.
Let me make this clear though, Red Eye hasn’t told me “No”, I am NOT wanting people to harass them. I want to use social media in a “humorous” way to get their attention.
So here’s what I would like;
1) are you on Twitter? Then Tweet Hey @redeyechicago! Did you answer @mominreallife’s DM yet? mominreallife.com #Rachelwantstotalktoyou

2) are you on facebook? Then head over to the RedEye page and ask them Hey RedEye! Have you answered @mominreallife’s DM yet? mominreallife.com

It’s just that easy!
I will shower you all with a thousand kisses if you help me with this!
Promise!

Oh, you want details about Cleve Jones?
I have plenty of details!

Tickets are now available for the event, An Evening With Cleve Jones: The Struggle for LGBT Civil Rights.

Cleve Jones, Harvey Milk´s closest collaborator, author, and founder of the AIDS memorial quilt, to visit Chicago August 29th to discuss the ongoing struggle for LGBT rights. As the promise from the Obama administration to be a “fierce advocate” for equality for gays and lesbians continues to go unfulfilled—with both the Defense of Marriage Act and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell upheld since the administration took office—Jones and other activists from across the country are planning a National Equality March as a show of mass support for LGBT rights. This meeting is sponsored by Join the Impact Chicago, Young Chicago Authors, Victory Gardens Theater, Chicago Public Radio WBEZ 91.5, and Haymarket Books.

• Includes performance pieces from Young Chicago Authors on the theme of LGBT rights, including the Louder Than A Bomb: The Chicago Teen Poetry Festival winning poem, “The Pink Triangle,” which can be previewed at Chicago Public Radio

• Serve as a fundraiser to provide buses from Chicago to the upcoming National Equality March to take place in Washington, DC October 10-11th. All proceeds will go to help fund buses to send people locally to the national march on Washington. The suggested donation is $5 but on the website are several solidarity prices if you wish to donate more.

For more information or to arrange an interview with Cleve Jones, contact Sarah Macaraeg at sarah@haymarketbooks.org or 312-315-8476.

An Evening with Cleve Jones: The Struggle for LGBT Civil Rights
Saturday, August 29th 6:00 – 8:00 pm
Victory Gardens Theater, 2433 N. Lincoln, Red/Brown/Purple Line: Fullerton
$5 suggested donation, to benefit Join the Impact Chicago,
towards buses from Chicago to the National Equality March in DC, October 10th

For more information, visit:
www.jointheimpactchicago.com
www.equalityacrossamerica.org
www.youngchicagoauthors.org
www.haymarketbooks.org
www.chicagopublicradio.org
www.victorygardens.org

P.S. If I missed thanking you for your help yesterday let me know! I am not announcing the people that donated money…..yet. I’m trying to plan some extra fun for them!

This is the most important post I have ever written.
I am asking for your help.
I need the help of my regulars, my lurkers, my scanners, my haters.
I need you to help me spread the word.

As many of you know I am heavily involved in the March on DC for LGBTQ equal federal rights. I am involved in the Chicago chapter of Join The Impact, but this March goes further than the borders of Chicagoland. There are LGBTQ needing help, needing support all over the country. This March is for them.

We are not marching for gay marriage, we are not marching to hate on the Bible, we are marching to get federal rights for all of America’s citizens. We are marching so that a person who fights and risks their lives for their country should be able to carry a picture of their partner in the uniform. We are marching so that when a gay man gets beaten and tied to a fence post to die it is considered a hate crime. We are marching so that a good teacher will not lose her job because she loves another woman. We are marching so that a senior citizen can honor the wishes of their partner of 50 years when they get seriously ill and be allowed to stay by their bedside to provide comfort.

Cleve Jones is hoping to have every district in the country represented at Washington DC. To do that we need to get people there. How can you help?

*if you live in the Chicago area or are willing to travel to Chicago you can join me! For $100 (given to JTI Chicago) you can get on a bus Saturday night, march on DC Sunday, be back home early Monday morning. I’m going! We can watch movies, talk, take a million pictures, do some good! What a way to start your fall!

*if you can’t make it but want to help you can donate! See that beautiful yellow paypal button? For the price of a beer or a coffee you can help someone that can’t afford to go, someone that desperately needs to find some support. This money is NOT for me, all money will go to JTI Chicago which they put towards getting people on buses.

*if you can’t spare the funds you can help spread the word! Post this post on your blog. Reference this if you write a post in your own words. Link to it. Tweet about it (#mominreallifefundraiser). Tumblr it. Facebook it. Digg/Stumble/Reddit it. I don’t care what, just keep it going. Be honest, how much work does it take? Let those know out there that you want to help!

Help me help them.

Please.

“People never forget that helping hand especially when times are tough.”
Catherine Pulsifer

Patrick Healy from the New York Times:

In an unusual move for a Broadway show, the producers of the musical “Hair” announced on Monday that they were canceling the Sunday matinee on Oct. 11 so that the cast could join the National Equality March that day in Washington in support of gay-marriage rights. Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, a producer of “Hair,” said that the decision reflected the spirit of the musical. “Its message of change and hope and inclusion is one we try to live, not just preach,” he said in a statement. Monday’s announcement was made at a rally in Los Angeles after the “Hair” cast taped a segment there for “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien.” A spokesman for “Hair” said the producers were adding a performance for Monday, Oct. 5. People who have tickets to the Oct. 11 matinee can exchange them for another performance.

Yes on Gay Marriage

Fort Worth — The mayor of this Texas city apologized Tuesday for a raid on a gay bar that sparked claims of brutality and procedure violations.

About 250 people packed City Council chambers and an additional 150 watched on televisions in the hallway or overflow rooms as officials briefly discussed the June 28 raid that left one man hospitalized with a serious head injury.

At one point during the meeting, someone in the audience called out for an apology. Mayor Mike Moncrief said: “If you want an apology from the mayor of Fort Worth: I am sorry about what happened in Fort Worth.”

A nice gesture, to be sure. But I want more. I’d like to hear the police officers themselves make public apologies, especially to one man, Chad Gibson, who suffered a severe head injury as a result of the raid and spent a week in the hospital. I want them to own up to what was so obviously an excessive use of force in a situation they instigated themselves. I want them held responsible for their actions and I want them to know that what they did was wrong.

I will offer no round of applause, and I will not smile in their faces upon their apologies, because such an action suggests that it merits a pat on the back and an “Aw, thank you for coming to your senses.” No. Chad Gibson, and the gay community in Forth Worth, deserve an apology and owe nothing in return. Until that happens, I will remain nonplussed. I’m waiting…

PALM SPRINGS, Calif. (AP) — Cleve Jones is happy. As happy as he has ever been, thank you. He has a labor union job he loves, powerful allies in Hollywood and Washington, guys to date. Best of all, a new generation of gay activists has embraced him as the mentor he once had, the man whose story he helped deliver to the screen in the movie “Milk.”

Call it a cultural confluence, call it a comeback. Now 54 and the closest the gay rights movement has to a living legend, the former protege to a political martyr and creator of the AIDS Memorial Quilt is busily planning his next act — a march on the nation’s capital that he hopes will usher in the final era in his community’s struggle for acceptance.

“There was a time when I thought I would never be happy again,” Jones says, standing barefoot in the tiki-torched yard of the California desert bungalow where he has lived since 1999 but is rarely home long enough to enjoy. “I feel so connected to the movement again.”

That he feels compelled to comment on his good fortune says a lot about the twists Jones’ own life took after 1978, the year openly gay San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk was assassinated.

Culture watchers will remember that Jones, the 23-year-old City Hall intern portrayed in “Milk,” went on to create the 47,000-panel quilt that humanized the lives lost to AIDS. Less widely known is that during the decade he spent weaving one of the world’s largest folk art projects into the nation’s fabric, Jones was preparing to die himself.

Instead, he became one of the AIDS epidemic’s earliest survivors.

“If I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have saved money and joined a gym,” laughs Jones, who shows the puckish sense of humor actor Emile Hirsch exhibited as his on-screen alter-ego.

When talk turns to the National Equality March scheduled for the second week of October in Washington, however, Jones turns serious.

His goal is to build an army of activists drawn from each of the nation’s 435 congressional districts. Afterward, participants will be sent home to pressure their representatives and the White House into removing the remaining barriers to gay equality, such as the policy that prevents gays from serving openly in the military.

If successful, Jones’ vision would represent a sea change in the gay rights movement’s strategy of securing victories piecemeal on the local or state level.

“We got locked into this pattern of fighting for fractions of crumbs — ‘Oh please, sir, in this county could we please not be fired for being gay if it’s all right in this county for you to evict us for being gay?’” he says. “It’s been this ping-pong with our basic civil rights….If you are a free and equal people, why would you settle for this?”

Jones agreed to organize the march at the urging of veteran activist David Mixner, who proposed it as a way to lobby President Barack Obama to follow through on his campaign promises.

“When he has a sense of righteousness about a mission, he has a tenacity I have rarely seen,” said Mixner, who has known Jones since the 1970s. “He is not a person who has ever put himself before the mission.”

Many gay leaders quickly dismissed the march idea as a waste of time and money. Jones took to the Internet and the gay political circuit to address the nay-sayers.

During more than 35 years of activism, friends and associates say that Jones has weathered criticism before.

In 1986, when he was trying to amass support for a giant quilt stitched by people who lost loved ones to AIDS, even fellow activists refused to get on board, according to Jones. Many saw the project as a morbid endeavor that would distract them from the serious work of persuading the government to invest in AIDS research.

Jones persisted. The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt is now recognized as not only a powerful symbol of loss, but a turning point in the public’s perception of the disease.

“I thought who is going to grieve the most when I die? It’s going to be my family — my parents, my little sister and my grandmothers. I wanted a place in this movement for my grandmothers,” he says.

With his health waning, Jones in 1990 relinquished control of the quilt to a nonprofit foundation that eventually moved the 54-ton quilt to Atlanta. He continued to serve as its public face until five years ago, when tensions between him and the foundation’s new leadership bubbled over with his firing and an unsuccessful wrongful termination suit.

In recent years, Jones has worked as a gay community liaison for the national hotel workers union, an outgrowth of his activism.

He credits Milk, the middle-aged camera store owner turned politician, with transforming him from a shy and somewhat aimless young hippie into a committed activist unafraid to use his voice or to be open about his sexuality.

“Harvey was never a shadow to me. He was an inspiration, a light. His biggest gift to me was to not fear straight people,” he said.

Jones’ determination not to let Milk’s legacy fade was key in getting the movie made, said screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for his work on the film. Jones served as the movie’s historical adviser.

“Cleve never lost his belief in the power of the grass roots,” Black says. “I remember when I first met him, over those first few years of research and even when shooting ‘Milk’ he would say, ‘What is your generation doing? I can’t imagine how empty it must be not to have a really strong generational purpose.’”

In Jones, Black sees an heir to Milk’s role as an inspirational leader. “Milk” opened last November just before the 30th anniversary of Milk’s assassination and just after California voters passed a ballot measure rescinding the right to wed the state Supreme Court had granted gays five months earlier.

For weeks, young activists protested in major cities across the country.

“I saw this man’s eyes light up in a way I had never seen,” Black says of Jones. “I saw him come to life when the young people started to rise up. I think he recognized in them a purpose he hadn’t seen since his own days with Harvey Milk.”

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

July 10, 2009 | Art Cribbs leans forward in his pressed blue shirt and pink tie, wide-eyed and wistful, exclaiming his love of wedding ceremonies while sitting in his office one morning.

“It’s just glorious,” he said. “Every time I do a wedding, I go back to my wife and reconnect. It’s like reliving our own wedding vows.”

But Cribbs, a 59-year-old African-American minister with the United Church of Christ in San Marino, Calif., isn’t attending many weddings lately.

Headed by John Tamilio and Tricia Gilbert of Pilgrim Congregational United Church of Christ in Cleveland, the Refuse-to-Sign campaign seeks to make the division between church and state clearer, as it concerns the issue of marriage.

Supporters of the campaign argue that faith leaders have, by default, become agents of the state, signing off on marriage licenses — whether or not they agree with the state’s policy on marriage. By asking clergy to refuse to sign marriage certificates, they hope to make a distinction between the obligation of the state to afford equal rights to all and marriage as a religious sacrament.

In short, the Refuse-to-Sign campaign says, while churches have the right to choose whether to bless same-sex couples, states should not have such a choice, and have a duty to extend marriage certificates to all who seek them.

Clergy aren’t the only ones participating in the campaign. Couples can also join the movement by voluntarily going to a local judge or court clerk for the signing of the marriage license, rather than to a church leader; they look to their congregation strictly to provide a religious ceremony.

Tamilio says the movement is just now gaining ground, with a couple of dozen interfaith leaders already signed up. But he believes that there are thousands out there who are interested in such a campaign, although the specific way clergy participate does vary.

Cribbs, for example, isn’t just refusing to sign marriage certificates. He’s refusing to perform at weddings at all.

As an African-American who grew up in the impoverished Watts area of Los Angeles, famous for the large-scale 1965 race riots, a backlash to the lack of social services in the area and discriminatory behavior by police, Cribbs says he can’t see doing anything else. The discrimination faced by African-Americans in the ’60s is not unlike the challenges homosexuals face today.

“I cannot with good conscience perform weddings for heterosexuals knowing people who are gay and lesbian are being denied that opportunity,” he said.

Molly Holland Avery, founder of the Organization for Cultural Competency, a group dedicated to bringing people of diverse backgrounds together, voluntarily forwent a civil ceremony as part of the campaign, opting solely for a religious one. She says she understands the discrimination same-sex couples are facing today.

“We’re a mixed-race couple,” 67-year-old Avery said, referring to her African-American husband. “Forty years ago, there were several states where we could not be married.”

All Saints Church, an Episcopal church in Pasadena, Calif., is one of a few congregations that has joined the campaign so far, declaring, “We are no longer in the civil marriage business.”

“We are not going to allow the state to make us agents of discrimination,” Susan Russell said, the congregation’s senior associate. (Russell issued this statement from the Episcopal Church’s general convention being held in Anaheim, Calif., this week and next. The convention is set to consider resolutions that would allow same-sex blessings in the church, as well as the appointment of gay bishops, resolutions that many Anglicans disagree with and that have resulted in friction among members.)

The inability of a church’s leadership to unanimously agree on the issue of homosexuality or same-sex marriage has led to troubles for some who have joined the Refuse-to-Sign movement.

Anne Cohen, a minister at First Congregational Church in Glendale, Calif., had at one point spoken out about her refusal to sign and her decision to withhold her services from heterosexual couples. Cohen, however, now says she has promised her congregation that she will no longer talk about her “personal decision.

Still, John Witte Jr. at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University says, a movement that asks clergy to stop signing is likely to gain ground. Witte says prior to the American Revolution, a strict separation of church and state, specifically as it concerns marriage, existed. And he suspects we’re heading full circle.

“I think it’s probably a start to a new trend,” he said. “Clergy are going to get out of this marriage business.”

Canada and Western Europe already operate under a two-step process, not unlike the one advocated by supporters of Refuse-to-Sign. People in these countries are used to looking to churches to experience marriage as a sacrament, and to the state for the signing of the certificate. And Witte says certain denominations of Baptists, Quakers and Catholics chose to remove themselves from the business of marriage long ago.

In fact, Witte says a parallel can be drawn between what is happening today with regard to marriage, and what has happened in the past with regard to adoption. Although the Catholic Church, like other religious organizations, has traditionally acted as an adoption agency, when faced with pressure in states like Massachusetts to allow same-sex couples to adopt, the church has opted to quit the business altogether, rather than continue to deal with the controversy stirred by the state’s mandate.

Of course, unlike in adoption, which is an all or nothing proposition, churches could decide to quit the business of marriage, while still overseeing unions; they would simply extricate themselves from the civil side of marriage, that is, the signing of the certificates.

It’s an idea that organizers think both conservatives and liberals can get behind.

The Refuse-to-Sign movement, despite being made up largely of liberal organizations, is actively making an appeal to conservatives: We want your church to be able to decide for itself on the issue of same-sex marriage, even if, in the end, it chooses not to bless same-sex couples; we just don’t think the state has that choice.

Although conservatives may not like the direction the country is heading, they could be satisfied with the knowledge that they will continue to have the freedom to deny same-sex couples the right to marry, without getting hassled by the state or other religious organizations.

And although the Obama administration has been receiving piss-poor grades from the LGBT community of late, there are enough who are afraid of what might be around the corner — on both sides of the debate — that a movement to seek more autonomy, and separate church and state on the issue of marriage, could very well be appealing. For supporters of gay marriage, it means avoiding the possibility that friends who are homosexual will never achieve marriage status, and for those on the other side of the debate, it means the religious communities they belong to won’t be forced to comply with a state mandate with which they disagree.