Finally.

It passed the House--for the second or third time.
It passed the Senate--for the first time.
Now we're still waiting for Obama to act on the repeal of DADT.
I got four emails on Saturday with the news.
Unfortunately, as the Post said, repealing DADT was a solid, less controversial issue (as ENDA really should be--but I'm not seeing a whole lot of action going on there) . Marriage is going to take a lot more oomph to pass.
Harvey Milk once said, "Come out, come out, wherever you are." meaning come out of the closet, of course, in hopes that those who formerly were against gay rights, finding that they know someone who's GLBTQ, will change their minds and support their friends and family. This is insanely difficult, I know. But it could help.
On the right and below are some pictures of the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy in San Francisco.

Special treatment? Come on.

I know that some people are of the opinion that gay people can do whatever they want in their own homes and shouldn't try to get 'special treatment'.
But taking a real look at the issues shows that special treatment is the last thing on the list.
We'll step away from the hot topic of same-sex marriage for a moment and look at plain old rights.
For one thing, did you know it's legal in most states to be fired from a job just for being gay? How is that fair? It doesn't matter to you if I'm a woman, if I'm an ethnic minority or a religious minority, but who I date comes into play? What does that have to do with how well I perform a job?
Don't Ask Don't Tell is related here. Top specialists are fired all the time from the military for being gay.
Finally, the paper reports to me that GLBTQ teens are punished more severely in schools.
Can anyone really believe that sexual orientation has anything to do with our education and job?
Stand with me and stop this.

Hospital Rights

I couldn't believe it was true that hospitals would ban gay and lesbian couples from visiting their partners in the hospital. It turns out this wasn't exact, but applied to serious illness and incapacitation. But no more.
I remember watching an interview with the Obama party pre-election where they stated that they think we should have the right to visit each other in hospitals. And now it's happened. At every hospital that accepts Medicare and Medicaid, patients have the right to choose who visits them and who "may make their critical health-care decisions". Read the story here.
And read the Human Rights Campaign's take on it here.

Gaydar

What is gaydar? It's actually made its way into the dictionary. Type it into Dictionary.com and you get four results. I like this one.

Main Entry:	gaydar
Part of Speech:	n
Definition:	an intuition about whether someone is homosexual; a homosexual person's ability to identify other homosexuals through intuition or interpretation of signals
Etymology:	1992; gay + radar
Usage:	slang

But according to the Washington Post today, gaydar isn't just for gays anymore.
An article by Rex W. Huppke entitled "Sorry, Ricky Martin. Flying under the gaydar is less frequent than ever." says that straight people too can often discern whether someone is gay. The article cites J. Michael Bailey, a psyche professor, who says that "gay and straight people who viewed the videos correctly identified straight people 87 percent of the time and correctly identified homosexual people 75 percent of the time" (though beware of statistics--notice he doesn't say which percentages gay people guess right and which percentages straight people guess right, but lumps them into one category. Neither does he mention bisexual and in-between people or how random the selection of either the guessers or those they were guessing about was).
I can easily believe that gaydar would work for straight people. I believe that gay people are more likely to look at someone and actually ask themselves whether the person is gay, whereas many straight people don't often even consider the possibility.
Bailey also says that gay stereotypes often (though he specifically says not always) do hold true. I'm not sure I believe this. But take from it what you may.
A different study posted on this blog gives nearly the same results. Cool stuff.
One thing that interests me is how exactly gaydar works. Does it require imagining that person is gay, or specifically wondering, as this study seems to imply? Or is it an automatic thing? I have never experienced it myself, but who knows. Maybe someday.

Same-Sex Marriage in DC Celebrated in Post

I was reading the paper today, looking for the advice columns, when I happened upon an article about a gay wedding planner. I searched for it online, and first found a new article interviewing two gay rights activists of different generations.
If you still have the paper, the articles are pages C1 and C3 of the Metro Section and E10 of the Arts & Style section of the Washington Post.
The article about the interview was columnist Robert McCartney. He talked with Frank Kameny, who he says picketed the White House and "forced the American Psychiatric Association to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness". The other was Rich Madaleno, a Maryland state senator, who hopes the signing of the bill will press home to straight couples that gay couples are no different. He raises two adopted children with his partner.
The other article, by Ellen McCartney, is about Rob Gillan, the founder of D.C.'s Gay Wedding Planners, and the shocking number of inquiries he's received when "setting up a company focused on gay weddings". Also mentioned is Kathryn Hamm, who runs the site GayWeddings.com.
As a girl who can only recall fantasizing about how she would design her wedding to her wife, I think this is a wonderful thing to work for. Let's just cross our fingers that no Prop 8 problems crop up in DC as they did in California.