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  Yesterday Mayor Sam Adams released a statement concerning Sunday’s bias crime against 2 men holding hands:
“On Sunday evening, May 22, two men were attacked by several suspects as they walked, holding hands, from the Hawthorne Bridge on the trail to the East Bank Esplanade, on the east end of the bridge. The victims were pushed, and hit in the head, face, back and ribs. The suspects ran away after one of the victims broke away and called 911. Portland Police detectives have interviewed both victims, and a Portland Police Bias Crime Detective has been assigned to this case. Full details on the case can be found at PortlandPolice.com.
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  Photo by Dan Ostergren from the "Holding hands in solidarity" Facebook page This is the first I’m hearing of this story, but I feel it is important for the community to know, so I’m going to leave it up to the great reporting of Just Out‘s Erin Rook to detail the events on an attack on two gay men this past Sunday night. You cab read more on the Just Out website.
Brad Forkner, 23, and Christopher Rosevear, 25, were walking across the Hawthorne Bridge hand-in-hand after taking in an evening show at Darcelle’s Sunday, May 22, when they were assaulted by three men, Forkner says.
Bias crimes detective Kevin Warren said officers responded to an assault near the Eastbank Esplanade that night around 8:35 p.m. He could not confirm that the incident was being treated as a bias crime because he had not yet interviewed the victims. According to Forkner, however, officers at the scene said the circumstances suggested a bias crime.
“They deemed it a bias crime seeing how the men followed us for so long, nothing was stolen, and there seemed to be no other provocation than Christopher and I holding hands,” Forkner said. He added that the alleged attackers were yelling at them during the assault, but they couldn’t make out what the men were saying — Rosevear thought they could have been speaking another language, such as Russian.
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  Barbara McCullough-Jones Q Center is pleased to announce the selection of Barbara McCullough-Jones as the organization’s next Executive Director. Barbara was chosen through a national search and she brings more than 20 years of executive nonprofit experience to Q Center.
Barbara was the executive director of the LGBTQ Community Center in San Jose, California, was a founding member of the LGBTQ Center in Phoenix, Arizona and also founded the Lesbian Resource Project in Tempe, Arizona. Barbara served as President of the Association of United Way Agencies and represented more than 1,400 businesses during her time there. Recently, Barbara served on the Board of Directors for the National Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Centers (Center Link).
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  Pride in Action award winners Belinda Carroll (L) and Joe LeBlanc Each year Pride NW gives out 3 awards just prior to Pride season, “Spirit of Pride” Award, Youth Award (22 years old or younger) and the “Pride In Action” Award (for volunteer work in service to the community), in addition to the Grand Marshall honor, which this year goes to La Lucha: Portland Latino Gay Pride.
This year’s Spirit of Pride award goes to former Q Center board member Bob Speltz, for some largely unrecognized behind the scenes work. According to Pride NW President Debra Porta, “As one of the original founders of the Q Center, Portland’s LGBTQ community center, Bob has been instrumental in bringing Portland’s LGBTQ community together in ways that had not happened before, and giving us a home to call our own.”
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  Film still from 'Still Black - A Portrait of Black Transmen' Building community for queer students of color (QSoC) and their allies, the Queer Students of Color Conference (QSoCC) is the first of its kind in Oregon. Taking place from Friday, April 29th to Sunday, May 1st at Portland State University, this QSoC led and organized event seeks to address the unique issues that effect queer students of color and the communities they occupy.
Although a liberal-minded city inclusive to many folks on the sexuality and gender spectrum, Portland is considered the whitest big city in the US and often fosters queer spaces that are unwelcoming to queer people of color. In a state with a long, long history of institutionalized racism and displacement of people of color, Portland, OR is a prime location for anti-racist growth and QPoC empowerment, taking place at this year’s conference.
QSoCC main events include: keynote address by Portland-raised trans feminist activist, Elena Rose; the Portland premiere of Still Black—A Portrait of Black Transmen, and a Q&A with director/writer Kortney Ryan Ziegler to follow; daytime workshops; a dance party, and more. Open to community members from all backgrounds, identities, and orientations, this year’s QSoCC is a long-awaited landmark event in Portland’s queer history that is not to be missed.
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As you might have noticed, Basic Rights Oregon is hard at work on a freedom to marry campaign.
This week, labor leader and activist Dolores Huerta stated her support for marriage equality in a powerful video.
In this video, Dolores Huerta says supporting the freedom to marry is “so important” because “it’s a human right.” Ms. Huerta has spent more than a half-century advocating for human rights, […]
  I've always loved their tagline I just heard yesterday that one of my favorite sources for national/international LGBT news, Queerty, ceased to exist with only the vaguest of explanations. This is what they say on their site:
After more than five years of serving the LGBT community with news and entertainment, Queerty has come to a close. The decision to shutter the site was not an easy one to make, and it is with great pain that we say goodbye to our loyal readership. From all of Queerty’s writers and contributors, from our first unto our last day, thank you for spending some time with us.
Today I found some explanation from 365’s Jennifer Vanasco, who reblogs from Queerty (and Jossip) founder David Hauslaib:
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 You can go ahead and mark this in the “duh” category but a new study, conducted in Oregon, suggests that gay youth are more likely to attempt suicide in homophobic environments.
 The study, in the journal Pediatrics, scored the social environment in 34 Oregon counties using five criteria, including the share of schools with anti-bullying programs and anti-discrimnation policies that cover sexual orientation. The findings suggest that expanding these programs to more schools could substantially reduce suicides and suicide attempts by young people.
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  DJ Freddie Fagula holds a feminist icon sculpture in support of Planned Parenthood Planned Parenthood has been in the news a lot lately, fighting for there very existence. But even when PP is “completely” funded, there scope is technically limited to the prevention of baby-making. Lots of women take advantage of their medical services, contraceptives and other resources. But not every woman needs the meds or paps because she has sex with men, and while plenty of us fudge the truth in order to get services local PP workers knew that this policy was unfair and wanted to do something about it. That’s why they created the Equal Access Fund.
The Equal Access Fund, established by PPCW, gives low-income lesbians, bisexual women and trans people the same access to affordable annual exams and Pap tests as low-income heterosexual women, and increases access to health care to an underserved population. The fund removes the requirement of seeking contraception to access no-cost annual exams.
I a recent survey in three Portland health centers, front-line staff members estimated that in a single month, six lesbians decided not to access services because they could not afford them and were not eligible for CCare. We estimate that annually 150-175 women in our service area decide not to access services because they cannot afford it.
We also suspect that man more low-income lesbian, bisexual and trans patients at PPCW request and take home contraception they don’t require because they need help from FPEP to pay for their services This subterfuge puts up additional barriers between patients and their health care providers, making an honest discussion about relationships, sexual behavior and risk factors even more difficult for women who may be already hesitant to speak freely.
Consistently facing financial woes, the completely donor funded EAF is holding a trivia night benefit tomorrow night at Crush (1400 SE Morrison). We got a chance to sit down with some of the organizers on the eve of their big fundraiser to ask a little bit more about the program.
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  The original Bash Back protest November 2008 in front of Mt Hope Church in in Delta Township, Mich. (Photo courtesy of Bash back! Lansing) I don’t know too much about this story but will expound as more details are revealed. In the meantime, this press release, which I accessed through Facebook, does a pretty good job of explaining the basics:
Portland, OR– On Wednesday, March 16th, Google will be forced to hand over the email accounts of two queer activists from Portland, Oliver Hayes and Kat Enyeart, to the evangelical Mt. Hope Church in Lansing, MI. This subpoena is a part of a civil suit against the queer organization Bash Back stemming from a non-violent protest and political theater action that disrupted a church service at Mt. Hope Church several years ago. Both Portlanders are subpoenaed because of their alleged ties to the organization. However no factual evidence has been produced to support such a relationship [emphasis mine] existing and both deny membership in the organization.
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