Progress flag leaves out many
James Coleman s June 25 op-ed No Pride for some of us without liberation for all of us [Guest Opinion, online], recites the continuing disparities faced by LGBTQ people in homelessness, economic insecurity, and poorer physical and mental health facts of which we all need to be reminded. However, these realities hardly make an argument for embracing the so-called Progress flag as the successor to the rainbow flag. Instead, they argue for rejecting it.
The chevron in the licensed-for-profit (https://quasar.digital/terms/) Progress flag is meant to represent trans and Black and Brown LGBTQ+ people. That s a noble gesture. Rather than being inclusive, however, the insertion of stripes representing certain marginalized groups of LGBTQ+ people but not others is inherently divisive and exclusionary. There are more bi people than gay and lesbian people combined, yet they are often marginalized and suffer significantly greater rates of violence, poverty, an
Remembering Mike Salinas
I freelanced for the late B.A.R. news editor Mike Salinas in the 1990s, sending him political and AIDS-related stories from Los Angeles. As a former mainstream journalist, I often argued with him when he included activist terms under my byline; he once inserted The Betrayer in a Bill Clinton photo caption. But we worked well together.
Salinas was also insightful. He called me an environmental reporter because I wrote about fundraisers in a you-are-there style. He was right. I imagined my reader as a homebound person with AIDS who had tickets for the event but was too sick to go. I imagined a partner or friend reading him my coverage so that a person living with AIDS could picture himself there. Mike got a chuckle over the fashion fundraisers. One time I thought Sandra Bernhard was wearing a mustard yellow shag-carpet jacket strutting down the runaway. Luckily, I was seated next to a gay guy from the Gap who said she was wearing gay fashion designer Is