Innholdsfortegnelse for February/March 2021 i The Advocate

AS WE WERE putting together this travel issue, a Facebook photo from a year ago popped up of me standing giddily beside an iconic English phone booth. I was in London on a press junket for the film Emma, my first time across the pond since the ’90s. When that picture of me in England resurfaced — bringing with it a flood of memories of my pre-pandemic travel plans — I realized that soon, it will be nearly a year since The Advocate’s team went into lockdown (though many of our spouses or family members were, like many of you, frontline workers, forced to go to work when the rest of us were able to work from home). In the last three months of 2019, I’d flown to Connecticut (home),…

In the fall of 2020 the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced an 18-month initiative to increase the visibility of disabled creatives and elevate their voices. Developed after the foundations spent a year researching how to better serve disabled artists, writers, filmmakers, and other creatives, the initiative will invest $1 million in supporting 20 disabled creators whose work “advances the cultural landscape,” as the foundations put it. Through the Disability Futures Fellowship, Ford and Mellon hope to address industry-wide problems in the arts, journalism, and film — including a lack of disability visibility, accessible professional development opportunities, and a national grant program that considers the unique financial challenges of disabled creatives. One of the takeaways from the study is the mantra “nothing about us without us” (first…

Chef Gabriele Bertaccini inspired millions and took a huge swipe at stigma when he recently disclosed his HIV-positive status on the first episode of wedding reality series Say I Do. But before he won audiences over with his authenticity and charm on the popular Netf lix series, Bertaccini was busy traveling the world, studying his craft, and eventually launching successful catering and event planning businesses. Born in Florence, Italy, Bertaccini trained at the Buontalenti Institute of Culinary Arts and Management and worked in restaurants across Italy before relocating to the U.S. He first spent time in Arizona, where he earned degrees in journalism and public relat ions from Arizona State University. In 2008, he started his first catering business, iL Tocco Food. Known for its authentic, multicourse Italian-style meals, iL…

Will Jardell & James Wallington weren’t expected to win The Amazing Race. Although the gay couple had made it to the final three in season 32, they were behind the front-runners, the volleyball-playing bearded brothers Riley and Maddison McKibbin, until the brothers’ cabbie got lost. Suddenly the boyfriends took the lead, putting them right where Wallington had dreamed of being since he was a kid. He had already tried out for The Amazing Race numerous times before he met Jardell. Jardell brought reality TV experience to the relationship, having finished as runner-up in cycle 21 of America’s Next Top Model with Tyra Banks, behind the competition’s first male winner, Keith Carlos. Jardell says Top Model benefited him in “the learning curve of realizing that a camera’s in your face 24/7.”…

The history of trans representation in Hollywood is bumpy, to say the least. While we can now celebrate shows like Pose on FX and the recent hit series Veneno on HBO Max — an entire series based on the life of the Spanish trans icon Cristina “La Veneno” Ortiz Rodríguez — there are just as many examples that feature inauthentic, even dangerous depictions of trans people. Still, with this new blossoming of trans lives on-screen, the vast majority of those depictions are of trans women. In 1999, Brandon Teena, a real-life trans man who became the victim of a brutal murder, was portrayed in Boys Don’t Cry by cisgender woman Hilary Swank, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Since then, television has featured some trans male supporting characters,…

THERE HAS BEEN quite a bit of discussion around exactly how much importance or emphasis should be placed on gender when raising a child. As a new parent, I want to make sure that my daughter’s environment is always conducive to all gender expression while still playing with some mildly “girly” notions that make it so fun to be the father of a baby girl. However, beyond the role gender will inevitably play in my child’s life, my gender, as it relates to parenthood, has me pondering a new question. Exactly what, if any, impact does my male gender identity have on my role as a parent? Of course, my initial belief was that it had none at all; that parents are parents and gender doesn’t really have an impact…

1 YouTubing for Change LGBT Asylum Project cofounder Okan Sengun has launched a YouTube channel, where he says he “won’t be scared to discuss human rights abuses and which governments are oppressing different minorities, including LGBTQ people.” In the channel’s introduction, the San Francisco-based attorney tells his own immigration story and says he plans to use the platform to highlight global LGBTQ+ issues. 2 A Podcast for Aquí and Now Its name inspired by the “SAP” button on TV remotes that turns on Spanish dubbing, Spanish Aquí Presents is breaking new ground in Latinx representation. The Earwolf network podcast is hosted by four members of the first Spanish-language troupe of the Upright Citizens Brigade, two of whom are queer. Every week, SAP’s hosts bring an array of comedy, politics, and…

When Cason Crane, now 28, was about 18 years old, he was climbing Denali, the tallest mountain in North America. There, he encountered an obstacle he had never met before while ascending: homophobia. Denali is already “the most physically rigorous” of the world’s tallest mountains, attests the gay mountaineer, who recalled the arduous task of dragging a sled across a glacier with an 80-pound backpack while also avoiding the lethal risks of crevasses and avalanches. During this climb, he encountered a group of “wounded warriors,” military veterans who had been injured in service of their country. He was “so excited to see them” due to their life experiences. But as the saying goes, “never meet your heroes.” “I was really, really crushed when they responded to my energy and enthusiasm…

A growing number of LGBTQ+ people are venturing into the great outdoors, taking advantage of downtime to literally climb a mountain (or hike through a forest or camp in a desert). Disabled people, fat activists, and people of color are also beginning to find support and adventure in parks and open spaces near and far. These di verse and traditionally underrepresented folks are increasingly finding their ways down rivers, along hiking trails, through forests, and over mountaintops. A quick review of social media hashtags demonstrates the rising popularity of outdoor experiences for groups who in the past might have felt unwelcome or intimidated in a state or national park: #latinaswhohike, #allwomenoutdoors, #unlikelyhikers, #dykeswhohike, #womenwhowander, #disabledhikers, and #climbersofcolor are just a few. “We’re creating our own outdoor narrative,” Jenny Bruso tells…

Gay photographer Ron Amato began taking images of nude men in Provincetown, Mass. in 1999, as part of a “Men in Nature” series. Since then, he has traveled the world capturing gay men in the parks of Germany and Italy, on beaches in Florida and Fire Island, and in their homes in London and New York. Now a fulltime professor at Fashion Institute of Technology, Amato recently prepared a retrospective of his work for our sister publication Out Traveler (bit.ly/AmatoRetro). Here are some of our favorites from P-town.…

Consent. It’s sexy, yes, as the now-ubiquitous saying goes. But as Melissa Febos writes in her new essay collection, Girlhood, consent is oh, so complicated. “What do yes and no really mean in a culture where you’re prescribed to say yes all the time? And can harm be done when affirmative consent is given? And the answer I came up with, in short, is ‘Yes,’” she says on The Advocate’s interview podcast, LGBTQ&A. “There were a lot of instances where it just seemed easier to have sex or do whatever than it would be to say ‘No’ and deal with the fallout of saying no to someone and having to take care of their feelings or potentially deal with a scary assault situation,” Febos says. Consent was given, so who,…

WHEN MSNBC LAUNCHED The Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart in December, the move made Capehart the first out LGBTQ+ person to host one of the vaunted Sunday morning political talk shows. To his new show, which now takes the Sunday 10 A.M. time slot previously held by Joy Reid’s AM Joy (she now hosts The ReidOut), Capehart brings his years of experience covering Washington politics through three presidents to the cable news channel. His time in the Beltway makes him uniquely positioned to examine where the United States stands as a country and to delve into the stakes ahead with the Biden-Harris administration. “I want it to be a different kind of Sunday show, one that features important issues with important newsmakers and opinion makers, and that meets the audience where…

Last fall, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas opened the Supreme Court’s term by calling for the overturning of its 2015 ruling that established marriage equality nationwide. They’re now part of a 6-3 conservative majority on the court since Donald Trump got three nominees confirmed by the Senate. The situation gives LGBTQ+ Americans cause for concern, even amid optimism brought on by the election of a Democratic president who’ll have majority support in the House and Senate. But just how much worry is warranted? Right now no case that would actually overturn the Obergefell v. Hodges marriage equality ruling is making its way through the lower courts. But the statements by Alito and Thomas basically invite one. The imminent danger, civil rights lawyers say, is that the court could chip…

At the start of 2020, I had two girlfriends, was flirting with a dozen hot queers at a New Year’s Eve party, and was expecting it to be my sluttiest, most girlfriend-filled year. But then the global pandemic came and my two poly, long-distance relationships got a lot more complicated. March arrived, and suddenly I couldn’t fly to Texas or New Orleans to visit my girlfriends. I couldn’t buy them tickets and fly them to me in Los Angeles. And I definitely couldn’t flirt, let alone hook up with hot locals. I’ve been dating Hope for over three and a half years and Daisy for almost two, but when the pandemic hit, it felt like I had no idea how to be polyamorous, especially poly in two long-distance relationships. In…

As a child in a deeply religious family in Tennessee, future linguist and anthropologist Dr. K. David Harrison was certain of two things. “I knew I was gay. “I knew I was gay. I knew I wanted to be an explorer,” he tells The Advocate. The only problem? “I had no idea that anybody else ticked those two boxes.” Now Harrison has grown into the type of role model he once needed. The noted author and academic has made a career of traveling to isolated regions to study and document endangered languages. As a result of his efforts, he’s become a National Geographic Explorer and a fellow of the international, multidisciplinary Explorers Club (founded in 1904). He’s also the brains behind the club’s recent initiative seeking to bring greater visibility…

Television has not always been an affirming place for Black queer voices, but Brandon Kyle Goodman is changing that one punch line at a time. The 33-year-old nonbinary writer, actor, and advocate (who uses the pronouns he or they) has made a name for himself writing for Netflix’s hilarious animated series Big Mouth, a show about pre-teens surviving puberty. He’s signed on to write and voice a character in season 5 as well as its upcoming spin-off, Human Resources. His viral videos — discussing race, violence, and the Black Lives Matter protests—also brought awareness and support to groups like the Black Trans Travel Fund, the Bail Project, and the Innocence Project. He married Matthew Raymond-Goodman in Santa Barbara, Calif., last year, not long before the pandemic struck. He’s also the…