Gay In America: Color Lines Across Rainbow Skies

Last month, I marched in the annual NYC Heritage Of Pride March, the largest Gay Pride Parade in the world. I was joined by Xem Van Adams, a young actor, writer, and filmmaker. After the March, we returned to our daily lives, with thoughts of our day of pride still fresh in our heads. Yesterday, Mr. Adams released his four-part documentary, Gay In America: Color Lines Across Rainbow Skies.




In this insightful film, Adams tackles a prickly subject: Even though the flag of the LGBT Pride movement is a rainbow, meant to highlight our unity and the idea that we are all together in harmony, gays and lesbians in America still segregate themselves along racial and ethnic boundaries.



Even as we celebrated our wonderful, multi-hued diversity along Fifth Avenue, the floats, bands, and even the political statements we made, as Xem's interviewees point out, mask a sadder, darker truth. As a community, we as gays and lesbians still remain deeply divided in our associations, partner choices, attitudes toward other gays and lesbians of different ethnicities, and in our responses to homophobia in the society we all live in.



Xem makes the telling observation that before we as LGBTs can overcome the persecution we face in larger society, we must first overcome our own issues of tolerance and understanding. We are still "divided under the rainbow".



In this groundbreaking documentary series, Xem Van Adams and the people who share their stories and thoughts raise new imperatives and provocative issues for the LGBT community to address. Forty years after the Stonewall Rebellion, this film teaches us we've still got a ways to go. Full equality for our LGBT community won't happen until we overcome the inequalities within ourselves. Hats off to Xem Van Adams and company for bringing us a much-needed wake-up call!

67 Men in Saudi Arabia Face Whipping For Dressing In Drag

Over the weekend, comes news that 67 men in the Kingdom of Saudi arabia have been charged with cross-dressing and display of homosexuality. The Filipino men were attending a party and were discovered by Saudi authorities, officials there said.

OK, whenever we here in the United States think we have difficulties as gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or transgenders, we need only to look to other places around the world, which make our own problems look trivial in comparison. The human rights abuses (thinly disgused as "Laws of the State") in the Kingdom and countries like the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, and Burundi, are horrific. Gays are executed, beaten, whipped, sentenced to hard labor, or subjected to mob vigilantism in these and quite a few other countries where the LGBT community is subjugated, persecuted and vilified, just for being who they are.

There is precious little outcry from the American LGBT community on this, even as we rally for equal rights and same-sex marriage here at home. Too often we do not see (or avert our eyes to) the "legal" persecutions of LGBTs all over the world. Even as we mark the 40th anniversary of New York City's Stonewall Rebellion, we need to think about the millions of our brothers and sisters who cannot "rebel" against their persecutors, let alone have the freedom to "come out of the closet". During this month when we show our Pride as LGBT's, let's also take a moment to reflect on ways we can address the awful plight of those overseas who cannot do so. The world is watching.