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You could say GLSEN is getting a new principal. On Wednesday the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network announced that Eliza Byard will become its new executive director, replacing founder and longtime executive director Kevin Jennings. Byard, who takes the reins on November 1, spoke to The Advocate about the task ahead for LGBT students and all of us who want to see them thrive.
How is it possible to have spent three decades with your partner and still be in your 40s? By meeting in 10th-grade art class and sticking together from then on.
It's hard to imagine two more all-American boys than Brian Laswell, 34, and Andrew Farris, 36. Together a dozen years, they first met in Indiana when a mutual friend introduced them. They were each other's first relationship.
Fans knew comedian Suzanne Westenhoefer was really in love when her "girlfriend Jenn" started turning up in her onstage monologues. Westenhoefer met marketing pro Jennifer Houston four years ago, when both of them were working on a women's cruise.
For many gay couples, marriage means recognition, which isn't something Simon Doonan and Jonathan Adler lack. In 1994, Adler sold his first pottery design to Barneys New York, where creative director Simon Doonan presides as one of fashion's keenest wits.
Billy Porter, who gave one of his first interviews as an out actor in The Advocate just three years ago, breathes new life into the Broadway musical Once on This Island, running now at UCLA's Freud Playhouse.
Barely over a year since transgender activists labeled Barney Frank a turncoat, he's hired the first openly transgender legislative staff member on Capitol Hill.
As one of TV's most successful producer-directors, Paris Barclay knows all about opening minds through entertainment. That's one reason for the lavish wedding he threw with Christopher Mason, his partner of 10 years.
If there's one man who is essential to the gay brain trust, it's Tony Kushner. His towering, Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Angels in America galvanized Americans to make a deeper political and emotional commitment to the value of a gay life. Kushner found that same commitment with author and columnist Mark Harris.
Back in 1991 the Internet was only for geeks and grad students. Ron Buckmire, who was studying applied mathematics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in upstate New York, was both. When Buckmire visited Los Angeles that year, his welcoming committee included Dean Elzinga, who was studying mathematical logic at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Looks can be deceiving, particularly when it comes to Marilyn Twitchell, 83, and Jean Pyatt, 80. Sitting in front of their backyard pool in Los Angeles's Brentwood section, they hardly seem like the spitfires they are.
We thought we were winning. Until a few days ago, California's proposed anti-gay constitutional amendment, Proposition 8, was lagging in the polls. Now they're ahead. What happened? Money, an effective ad campaign, and a passionate voter base willing to stop at nothing to get their point across: In their minds, gay marriage is simply wrong.
At a same-sex wedding expo, Heather Matarazzo and Caroline Murphy tell how their romance got started, why tuxes on women are sexy, and why both partners should get to propose.
As Dr. Niles Crane on the hit sitcom Frasier, David Hyde Pierce had a great deadpan. That also extended to his own life: For years he wouldn't confirm or deny being gay. Since then he thawed enough to thank his longtime partner, Brian Hargrove, in his 2007 Tony Award acceptance speech. And on Saturday, Pierce was one baseball-capped protester among maybe 20,000 others marching for equality in Los Angeles.
As marriage equality opponents galvanized in the Crenshaw area of Los Angeles to target African-American voters, clergy members and other activists gathered just miles away to fight against California's upcoming ballot measure that would ban same-sex marriage.
The first meeting of performance artist Joan Spitler and filmmaker Leigh Grode was right out of a romantic comedy. It was 1993, during the Los Angeles gay and lesbian film festival Out on the Screen. Spitler, a lissome redhead, was sitting alone in the festival's cafe when a tall, butch, and handsome stranger walked in.
Peter Morrison entered his first Internet chat room when he was 27 years old -- but he wasn't hunting for sex. "I was looking for other gay people, someone who was out and comfortable," he remembers.
"A mind is a terrible thing to waste." "Friends don't let friends drive drunk." "Only you can prevent forest fires." Since the 1940s the Ad Council has been impacting the culture with slogans like these. Now the venerable nonprofit organization is out to educate teens that antigay slang doesn't cut it anymore -- and to kick-start the effort, it's recruited Hilary Duff.
Jay Mendes, an independent event manager (think the Emmy Awards), was at a club in 2004 when he noticed a sparkling young patron. Three days later, Mendes was asking Van Sao, who was visiting Los Angeles to attend a wedding, "Why don't you move out to L.A. and live with me?"
Brusso and Manelski's relationship involved a child from the start--their 6-year-old daughter, Camille. Manelski, her biological dad, shares custody with Camille's mother. "I always knew it would have to be somebody very special before I'd make the commitment to bring that person into her life," Manelski says.
