By Chloe Angyal • @chloeangyal • 12 years ago

Your chance to honor an unsung hero in the LGBT community

As you all know, June is Pride Month, and throughout the month, there are LGBT Pride events of all shapes and sizes happening all over the country. This year, the White House Office of Civic Engagement is celebrating by running a Champions of Change competition, where you can vote to recognize individuals who are doing great work in and on behalf of the LGBT community in America.

There’s George Stewart, a veteran who volunteers at SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders) in Harlem. SAGE is the nation’s first full-time advocacy center for GLBT seniors, and Stewart has been working with them for three years.

Or there’s the Redwood String Ensemble, an openly queer and queer-allied quartet at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. Their video is lovely not only because you get to hear them play a beautiful piece by Barber, but because they have really interesting things to say about how the trust and acceptance required to play together has inspired them to advocate for trust and acceptance in the wider world.

There are six candidates in total, but you can only vote for one – the finalists and winners get to go to the White House in July so they’ll no longer be unsung heroes. So go cast your vote!

Apologies for the lack of transcript, folks. If anyone can put one in comments, we’d be really grateful!

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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By Katie Barnes • @Katie_Barnes3 • 9 years ago

Trans Latina activist interrupts Pride Reception, calling for end to LGBTQ detention

Yesterday, the White House hosted its annual LGBT Pride Reception, an invitation only event for some of the nation’s most well-known and well-respected LGBTQ activists. 

This year, activist Jennicet Eva Gutiérrez, an undocumented trans woman and founding member of Familia: Trans Queer Liberation Movement, interrupted the president’s speech in protest of immigration policies harmful to the LGBT community, particularly the detainment and well-documented abuse of transgender people in spaces that do not correspond with their gender identity.

During his brief speech in support of Pride, Gutiérrez interrupted the president to say, “President Obama, release all LGBTQ in detention centers. President Obama, stop the torture and abuse of trans women in detention centers.” The President responded with: “Listen, you’re in ...

Yesterday, the White House hosted its annual LGBT Pride Reception, an invitation only event for some of the nation’s most well-known and well-respected LGBTQ activists. 

This year, activist Jennicet Eva Gutiérrez, an undocumented trans woman and founding ...