The Mad Professah Lectures

Nighthawking is the second book in the Detective Sergeant Adam Tyler series written by Russ Thomas. These British police procedurals are set in South Yorkshire, where the openly gay protagonist DS Tyler is a member of the Cold Case Review Unit (CCRU) of the Sheffield Police.

Nighthawking is set about a year after the events that transpired at the end of Firewatching. DS Tyler is working with (formerly PC) now DC Mina Rabbani on a cold case involving the disappearance of a young boy when the body of an unknown young Asian woman with ancient Roman gold coins over her eyes is discovered on the grounds of the Sheffield Botanical Gardens by a nighthawker, someone who uses metal detectors to seek out buried and hidden items of value on public lands.

DS Tyler is busy with and distracted by his obsessive investigation into a personally significant cold case: his own police detective father's suspicious death two decades ago when Tyler was a teenager. It thus falls to Mina to try and solve a case which is much more complicated than it first appears.

As with the first book in the series, the primary appeal of the story is seeing first hand how Tyler and Mina, both outsiders in the police force due to race, gender and sexual orientation, go about their jobs as police officers trying to solve crimes. In Nighthawking, there's less depiction of Tyler’s gayness but there’s more depiction of Mina’s intelligence and I’d say that’s a net positive. That being said, it’s a lot rarer to have an openly gay police detective than it is to have a smart female police detective in these genre books so I hope that the author doesn't shy away from depicting his protagonist's sexuality in future books, just as one would expect it to show up as one aspect of a heterosexual character’s life.

Another similarity Nighthawking has with Firewatching is the complexity of the plot, along with a veiled depiction of events from the perspective of the perpetrator. In Firewatching there were curious blog posts describing the work of a serial arsonist as intertextual elements between chapters. In Nighthawking we get brief reports from nighthawkers summarizing the results of their forays and searches. Both times we eventually realize that these elements are providing clues about the identity of the perpetrator.

There are many plots in Nighthawking. Tyler finds a lead which may lead to more information about his father’s death, and he also ends up cracking the cold case of the disappearance of the young boy, mostly inadvertently, as Rabbani does most of the work to identify the dead girl and whoever killed her. Of course, other dead bodies and near-fatal incidents also appear in the book along the way before we get a surprising resolution to the book’s primary mystery. The final scene of the book is a stunner; it presents the reader with new information about Tyler’s father’s death that will surely reverberate in the next book in the series, Cold Reckoning.

Title: Nighthawking (DS Adam Tyler, #2).
Author: Russ Thomas.
Format: Hardcover.
Length: 384 pages.
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Date Published: February 23, 2021.
Date Read: December 21, 2022.

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A-.

Martin Jenkins

Kelli Evans

LGBT History was made this week with the retention election of California State Supreme Court justice Martin Jenkins on November 8 and the approval of Kelli Evans to join the state's highest court by the Committee on Judicial Appointments on November 10. Jenkins, 69, was nominated to the California Supreme Court in October 2020 by Governor Gavin Newsom. Evans, 54, was nominated to the court by Newson in August 2022. The California State Supreme Court now has seven members and is amazingly diverse:

There has been a lot of discussion of the movie Bros in the last few weeks after its opening weekend box-office gross was below expectations and Hollywood basically labeled the film as a "flop." Writer and star of the film Billy Eichner said on social media that "straight people [...] didn't show up for Bros" and that it was "disappointing, but that's what it was." That tweet was later deleted but the audience reception to an explicitly gay rom-com that was released by a major Hollywood studio in movie theaters was bound to get a lot of tongues wagging and think pieces written and read. However, despite the historic nature of the release of Bros, in the end I think the main reason is that it's just not a very good movie, and that may be the reason why ore people didn't rush out to see it and make it a box-office success. (Right now it's still an open question of whether it will make a profit, but it seems very unlikely .)

To be more precise, I do think that there's a version of Bros which could have been a very good movie. The major flaw in Bros is the casting of Eichner as the lead character. Eichner plays Bobby, a somewhat neurotic podcast host and executive director of the inaugural National Museum of LGBTQ History. He is happy to go on Tinder and Grindr "dates" to hookup with other New York City gays.  Eventually he runs into Aaron (played by Luke MacFarlane), a hunky, handsome estate lawyer who hates his job and is also happy to "play the field." Eichner's Bobby spends a lot of his time yelling his (admittedly funny) lines to anyone within earshot, which includes his coworkers, his straight friends, Aaron, Aaron's mom and many more. The first problem with casting Eichner as the lead is that he doesn't have the dramatic chops to provide a nuanced portrayal of Bobby, so he comes across as a bitter queen. I think it is at least possible that a more nuanced actor could have played the role as written where Bobby is still annoying and acerbic but in a way that the audience could still root for him to succeed. I appreciate what Eichner was trying to do with Bros: create a gay rom-com without sanding over the rough (or unfamiliar to non-gay folks) edges of urban gay life to not scare off the straight people. But even as a gay man, I thought Bobby's character was A LOT and problematic in multiple ways. (He has a LOT of opinions on how gay people comport themselves which frankly would have seemed homophobic or demeaning if said by a straight character and even by the end of the movie it's not clear that his opinion about other gays has really changed that much.)

The second problem with casting Eichner as the lead is the resultant glaring lack of diversity in the two leads. In 2022 to think that a gay rom-com should have two gay white dudes as the lead is just hubris and tone deaf. (It stuns me that the coin-counters and pencil pushers at the studio thought this concept would be one that is worth spending $20-30 million on production and marketing. But then again, how much do you want to bet these fiduciary decisions were not being made by a diverse set of greenlighters at the studio?) Yes, the film (cleverly) tries to overcome this lack of diversity in the leads by adding cameos from gay icons as well as making Bobby's workplace a setting with a tapestry of the members of the LGBTQ rainbow. There's a butch lesbian, not one but two(!) transwomen of color, a bisexual and a Generation Z non-binary person who constantly streams their life online. But in now way are these characters are central to the story. The other notable bit of diverse casting in Bros was in an (actually pretty funny) hookup scene that Bobby has with a muscular, masculine Black guy after meeting him at the gym during a "straight-acting" phase. The hookup doesn't end well when Bobby's post-coital voice is an octave higher than his pre-coital one and this revelation that Bobby's butchness was a facade (unsurprisingly) freaks the Black guy out, but maybe not for the reason we might think at first. "Well, would you have hooked up with me if I had talked like this before?" Bobby asks, and the guy says, "Yeah, probably, because you're hot." "Thanks!" Bobby says. "But not now! Now you just seem weird!". On the way out Bobby notices a huge Barbra Streisand poster next to the door, which shows that even butch Black gay guys in New York City love their divas! Yay, intersectionality!

With all that said there are lots of good parts of Bros to like. There are fun cameos by gay icons like Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy), Bowen Yang (Fire Island), and Debra Messing (Will and Grace) to name just a few. Aaron is very easy on the eyes to look at, and we see a LOT of him (and his well-sculpted body), as the film doesn't hesitate from depicting typical sexual situations gay men like Aaron and Bobby get into in an urban mecca like New York City (and Provincetown). That fact that almost gthe entire cast (even the straight roles) are played by well-known out LGBT actors is kinda cool. Also, the script is firmly committed to being a parody of Lifetime romantic comedies (this is a fun inside joke, because the actor who plays Aaron has been in more than a dozen of them) and these gags are well-executed. The film has interesting things to say about body image in gay men and how the trappings of (hyper)masculinity distort how gay men interact with each other in multiple social settings (from hookup apps to gyms to going out to even just walking down the street).

But in the end, although the audience is supposed to be rooting for Aaron and Bobby to get together, it's hard to make that sale because I, for one, didn't buy that the two are actually right for each other. Bobby has a LOT of internalized homophobia which comes out as extreme criticism of modern gay life and an reluctance/inability to commit. Aaron has the more interesting character arc as he makes changes to his life when the initial relationship between Aaron and Bobby doesn't work out because of both of their insecurities. (This is not a spoiler because of course in any rom-com the two star-crossed lovers don't live happily ever after after the first fling!) Another interesting twist on the rom-com is that the movie ends with the two just promising "to date each other for three month and re-assess" not a lifetime commitment (sic) and that gives the overall plot verisimilitude with these characters.

Overall, I agree with some of the reviews who say that even though Bros was not the historic achievement Bill Eichner wanted it to be, it is still a milestone in LGBT cinema that he should be proud of and I am glad it was made and exists in the media landscape. After all, for true equality, LGBTQ people need to have the right to have all sorts of media telling our stories, and some will be crappy and some will be sublime. (My primary complaint is that we still really haven't had a diverse LGBT film that connects with today's audiences.) The one thing Bros did do successfully is to bring us closer to the day where the future of LGBTQ representation in the media is not dependent on any single vehicle.

Title: Bros.
Director: Nicholas Stoller.
Running Time: 1 hour, 55 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated R for strong sexual content, language throughout and some drug use.
Release Date: September 30, 2022.
Viewing Date: October 3, 2022.

Writing: B+.
Acting: B.
Visuals: B-.
Impact: A-.

Overall Grade: B/B+ (3.16/4.0).

Star Rating:  ★★★½☆☆  (3.5/5.0).

Winter’s Orbit has received significant acclaim for its insightful writing and emotional resonance. The central plot revolves around the tried-and-true romance trope of the “fake-dating scenario.” This is when the two protagonists have to demonstrate for external stakeholders that they are a romantic couple when in reality they are complete strangers to each other. Of course, the two strangers get to know each other better as they spend copious amounts of time together in order to bolster the verisimilitude of their fake relationship and (inevitably) romantic sparks fly in reality. It’s another iteration of “Love Conquers All.”

In Winter’s Orbit the main characters are Kiem and Jainan. Kiem is a grandson of the Emperor and has the title of Prince. Jainan was married to Kiem’s cousin Taam, another Prince. The Jainan-Taam marriage also served the diplomatic purpose of uniting the two worlds of Iskaat and Thea, respectively. However, when Prince Taam is killed (which may or may not have been an accident) the Emperor asks (read: commands) Kiem to marry Jainan in order to maintain the appearance of good positive relations between Iskaat and Thea. This is important because the decennial review of the treaty that Iskaat has with a galactic superpower called The Resolution that provides interstellar communication, trade and travel is upcoming and political stability and domestic tranquility are factors the Resolution will consider during the treaty review process.

Real Life by Brandon Taylor seems like it is a book that was designed in a lab to appeal to me. It’s a fictional account of a Black gay graduate student who likes to play tennis and is working on getting his Ph.D. in a STEM discipline at a predominantly white institution in a small town somewhere in the northeast. 30 years ago I was a black gay graduate student who liked to watch tennis and was working on getting his Ph.D. in a STEM discipline (applied mathematics) at a predominantly white institution (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) in a small town in the northeast (Troy, NY).

However, Wallace, the protagonist of Real Life, is very different from the person I was then, and since the book is set in a contemporary context, his experience is very different from my graduate days. That said, the situations that Wallace experiences as well as the descriptions of some of the characters he interacts with seem very familiar. Wallace is a graduate student in biochemistry and has a cadre of white friends, most of whom are also graduate students (in various fields). The group contains a gay couple named Cole and Vincent, another named Lukas and Nathan, and a gay international couple named Klaus and Roman, a straight couple named Emma and Thom, two “straight” guys named Yngve and Miller and then there’s Wallace. Almost all of Real Life is told through Wallace’s eyes as he observes how his friends interact with him, as the only black guy in a group of white people. Wallace is from the South, and we learn he is the first in his family to have ever gone to graduate school, and perhaps the first to go to college. His life experience is very different from the people he hangs out with when he’s not working in the lab and he is also very different from the people he works with in the lab as well. Later we learn that he was basically abandoned by his father and that his parents apparently blamed him for the fact that a family friend molested the tween-aged Wallace. The key material of the book is sourced in the tension caused by the ways Wallace’s identity and temperament distort and disrupt his experience of everyday social interactions with those around him, especially the ways these are frequently leavened with micro-aggressions and not-so-micro aggressions. And that’s when he’s with his “friends”!

Relatively early in Real Life, Miller and Wallace hook up sexually, a somewhat surprising event initiated by the putatively heterosexual Miller. Both Miller and Wallace have some warped ideas about sexuality, to my somewhat prudish sensibilities. Suffice it to say, even though their sexual activities are consensual, afterwards one or both of them are sore or bruised. (Not exactly my idea of a good time, but “different strokes for different folks.”) Near the end of the book I wasn’t completely convinced both of them would survive its conclusion. The sexual fluidity of Wallace’s coterie of friends is an interesting feature of the books, and is another example of unspoken tension that animates some of the peculiar social dynamics in the group. For example, even though Yngve is straight, it is a commonly understood fact in the group that Yngve and Lukas are often together, hanging out publicly. Lukas' boyfriend Nathan doesn't seem to be bothered by this situation, since Yngve is "straight." However one of the other gay guy, Roman, is a troublemaker. He says something explicitly racist to Wallace, and he causes tension among the other gay couples by remarking on how happy he is that he is in an open relationship with Klaus. (Or as he puts it, "Nothing is better than f***ing someone while my boyfriend watches.") This completely sets Cole off, who is a bit strait-laced and prone to jealousy about his relationship with Vincent, who seems fascinated by the idea of something other than a monogamous relationship, while Cole seems to be a gay Republican in training. Cole is probably the gay guy Wallace is closest to. There's a very fun scene where there is a very detailed description of a tennis match the two play together which appears as if it could lead to something else, and definitely reveals the evanescent sexual tension that can arise in non-sexual interactions between gay men who are friends. In some instances Wallace deliberately chooses to exacerbate not ameliorate the conflicts that arise from these tensions. To me it seems clear that Taylor is portraying Wallace as a masochist, both sexually and emotionally. There are several examples in the book where painful things happen to Wallace and even when he could try to take action or respond to reduce the pain, he doesn’t, instead he “simply takes it,” as if he deserves (or enjoys?) being victimized.

Overall, Real Life is a quick, compelling and insightful read. The writing sometimes tends to the florid, and there's not much of a plot. (The central question is, "(How long) Can Wallace survive interacting with these people?") Wallace is in a bad situation, made worse by the cluelessness and casual racism of his “friends” as well as the precarious and disempowered nature of graduate education. I was hoping for a happy ending, but this is really not that kind of book. I’m somewhat surprised at the level of acclaim Real Life has received (such as being shortlisted for the Booker Prize) but I would definitely recommend the book to people, especially well-meaning white people who think the reason for underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities and women in STEM academic circles is a “pipeline” problem. Taylor provides real insight that rings true for me about what it’s like being “the only one” in certain academic settings as well as the complicated nature of gay male friendships. Since this is his debut novel, I look forward to reading future books by him.

Title: Real Life.
Author: Brandon Taylor.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 335 pages.
Publisher: Mullholland Books.
Date Published: February 18, 2020.
Date Read: March 3, 2021.

OVERALL GRADE: A-/B+ (3.5/4.0).

PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A-.

Openly gay, Filipino Patrick Bumatay, 41, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate by a 53-40 vote to a lifetime seat on the 9th U.S. Circuit Cort of Appeals. Bumatay is the first openly gay man to be appointed to the federal judiciary at the Circuit Court level (one rung below the U.S. Supreme Court) and is also the first Filipino to serve in that capacity. His nomination was opposed by both of California's U.S. Senators, Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein, which prior to the Trump administration would have doomed his candidacy. He was also opposed by basically every major LGBT and/or civil rights organization. He is Trump's 49 confirmed appointee to the circuit courts.

The Supreme Court finally has granted certiorari (agreed to hear and make a ruling in) for multiple cases of interest to LGBT citizens today. The question of whether Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which prohibits discrimination "because of sex" includes sexual orientation (and gender identity) has been an increasingly important one. I say finally also because this question had been pending at every Friday meeting of the Justices since January 2019.

The 2019 Williams Institute Moot Court competition in Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law  (in which I was a volunteer judge)  revolved around this very question as well as whether the "ministerial exception" prevented an employment discrimination lawsuit by a bisexual employee under Title VII.

There is a current split between circuit courts on the question of whether gay people are covered under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and thus the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide this  question by consolidating Altitude Express v. Zarda and Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. In Zarda, the Second Circuit ruled that Altitude Express impermissibly discriminated on the basis of sexual orientation against Don Zarda, a sky-diving instructor (who was killed tragically in 2014 but the lawsuit has continued in his name by his surviving partner and family). Altitude Express's appeal of that ruling is being consolidated with an 11th Circuit ruling in Bostock which refused to do an en banc reconsideration of its holding that child welfare services coordinator working for Clayton County did not have a right to sue for sexual orientation discrimination and gender stereotyping.

Additionally, the Supreme Court also agreed to hear, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a case of a transgender employee fired by a funeral home; the business is challenging the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's decision that gender identity is covered under Title VII's sex discrimination ban. Today's Queer Quote is the issue in that case:

Whether Title VII prohibits discrimination against transgender people based on (1) their status as transgender or (2) sex stereotyping under Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins.

 Price Waterhouse is a longtime precedent case (from 1989) which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex (gender) stereotyping, ruling that this is covered under Title VII.

Presumably these will be some of the most significant cases of the 2019-2020 Supreme Court term, and be released as decisions in June 2020, right in the thick of the 2020 presidential campaign is heating up (hopefully both nominees will  be known by then).

The doubt over whether LGBT people are protected by federal law against invidious  discrimination based in sexual orientation and gender identity is why the Equality Act was introduced into Congress earlier this year.

Hat/tip to SCOTUSblog

Lori Lightfoot is a 56-year-old former federal prosecutor and private attorney who just became the first Black lesbian to be elected mayor of Chicago. Lightfoot will become the highest ranking openly LGBT mayor in the country when she takes office and mayor of the largest city to be run by a Black woman, although not the only one. San Francisco (London Breed), Atlanta (Keisha Lance Bottoms), and Washington, D.C. (Muriel Bowser) are just a few.

Congratulations, Mayor Lightfoot!

Eric Bauman, longtime chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party and former vice-chair of the California Democratic Party under John Burton, was elected chair of the California Democratic Party in 2017 after a close and hotly contested election with Kimberly Ellis. He is the first openly gay man to lead the largest Democratic Party state organization.

This week Bauman was in the news again because he abruptly announced his intention to resign his position as party chair one day after multiple accusations of improper sexual comments and unwanted physical contact by Bauman were documented in a blockbuster Los Angeles Times story published on Wednesday November 28.

After the article came out Governor-elect Gavin Newsom and openly LGBT Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins were among the high ranking state Democratic politicians who called for Bauman's resignation.

I have known Bauman for years (and been to the annual holiday party at his house multiple times). I never witnessed any unwanted sexual comments but I would say that I have definitely seen him "tipsy." (It was a holiday party, after all!) Initially after word of the accusations were raised last week, Bauman had announced he would take a leave of absence to get treatment for "a problem with alcohol" but soon it became clear that in the current #MeToo era that response would be insufficient. I am somewhat surprised that these accusations of imroper behavior did not come to light last year when the internecine battle between the establishment party folks who backed Bauman and the progressive "Bernie-crat" folks who backed Ellis was raging.

Ricardo Lara has been declared the winner of the California Insurance Commissioner race, defeating former Republican (and current Independent) Steve Poizner. Lara is an openly LGBT state Senator and as of today he leads Poizner 52%-48% (or 400,000 votes) with nearly 10 million votes tabulated:
Lara becomes the first openly LGBT individual elected statewide in California!

Hat tip to Equality California.

The Last Temptation is Book 3 in the brilliant crime thriller series by Val McDermid featuring Dr. Tony Hill (a psychologist who profiles serial killers) and DCI Carol Jordan (police detective who investigates major crimes).

The first two books (The Mermaids Singing and The Wire in the Blood) were primarily about Carol and Tony teaming up to track and bring to justice two very different (and very sick) serial killers. McDermid does not make the identity of the perpetrator into a mystery, because in these books (and the third) the reader is given first-person insight into the serial killer and follow them as they plan and commit their crimes. Then we can see how well Tony does at discovering the killer’s motivations from their choice of victims. There is also suspense from the question of whether Tony and Carol will be able to capture the criminal before he kills again. 

However another feature of McDermid’s books is that during the course of the investigation she often puts the police into extreme peril. This is particularly true in Books 1 and 3 and in both cases Tony is placed in situations which could conceivably lead to his demise. In some sense it is probably progress that McDermid avoids the damsel-in-distress themes by putting the male protagonist in mortal danger instead of the female protagonist. But in my opinion it’s a little too facile a tactic to use to imbue the books with suspense (although we know there are well over a dozen books in the Tony Hill & Carol Jordan series so even though Tony is often in mortal danger at the back of the reader's mind we know it is very unlikely that Hill is actually going to ever be killed in one of these scenarios). In The Last Temptation Carol is also placed in danger and an event occurs which I suspect will have significant impact on their work together in the future.

The key strength of the Hill/Jordan books are their very clever plots as well as their very interesting settings. Each of the first three has been very different, with the common theme being the presence of a very sick and violent serial killer, Tony being placed in extremely dangerous situations and a complicated emotional relationship (even sexual tension) between Tony and Carol. Also, the secondary characters in the series (primarily other police officers assisting in the investigation) are generally well fleshed-out in the books, with their own thoughts and motivations provided to the reader as well. 

Overall, The Last Temptation is another strong entry into the British crime thriller/police procedural genre, although with a slightly fantastical plot point involving a doppelgänger around which the entire book revolves it is not as strong as the first two in the Hill/Jordan series. However, I eagerly look forward to reading the rest of the books in the series and am sad that there's only a total of ten published so far.

Moon Duchin is an out lesbian mathematics professor at Tufts University who has just become the sole pure mathematician in the 2018 class of Guggenheim Fellows. Here's the official announcement:

Moon Duchin is a mathematician at Tufts University, where she is also a Senior Fellow in the Tisch College of Civic Life and serves as the founding director of the interdisciplinary program in Science, Technology, and Society. She majored in Mathematics and Women's Studies at Harvard and received her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Chicago. 

Duchin's research in pure math lies in geometric group theory, low-dimensional topology, and dynamics. An area of particular interest is nilpotent geometry, or the shape of groups that fail to be commutative in a controlled way. She has studied random walks, random groups, and rigidity theorems for surfaces and billiards. She is also interested in the social studies of science, particularly the role of expertise, authority, intuition, and proof. 

Duchin is currently engaged in a long-term project on the geometry of gerrymandering, an application of mathematics to civil rights. She has worked to build a national network of collaborators doing wide-ranging work on mathematical and computational interventions in electoral redistricting. They aim to engage the legal, political, and philosophical dimensions of the gerrymandering problem, working closely with civil rights organizations. Duchin recently served as a consultant for the governor of Pennsylvania in the court-mandated push to redraw the congressional map.

I know Moon relatively well, having spent a 3 days attending the latest Geometry of Redistricting Workshop at the University of San Francisco last month. I'm not surprised she has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, I think that she should also be considered for an even more prestigious award, the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, in the near future.

Congrats, Moon!

Kevin Carnell has lots of followers on Instagram (@kevincarnell). HThe dark-skinned hottie is today's Eye Candy selection. As a bonus for some regular readers of the blog, Kevin is one of the few models we have features here who are openly gay. Enjoy!

Corey Johnson has been an openly gay city councilperson in New York City representing the 3rd district which includes the gayborhoods of Chelsea, Hell's Kitchen and the West Village along with parts of the Upper West Side since 2013. He replaced former openly lesbian NYC City Council speaker Christine Quinn who lost a Democratic primary for Mayor to Bill De Blasio.

This week comes news that Johnson, who is 35-years-old, openly gay and HIV-positive, may be following in Quinn's shoes to become the Speaker of the New York City council, the 2nd most important and powerful political position in the nation's largest city. Recently re-elected to a second term, Mayor de Blasio tweeted his support for Johnson's bid to become Speaker:

Congratulations to the next speaker of the @NYCCouncil, Corey Johnson. He’s been a force for the people of his district and I know he will bring that same commitment, passion, and energy to the speakership. I look forward to working with him on a progressive agenda for NYC.

The New York Times also reported that Johnson has the votes in the 51-member council to be elected Speaker in January.

Congratulations @CoreyinNYC!

Toni Atkins, former Speaker of the California State Assembly, has been announced as the next leader of the California State Senate when current Senate president pro tem Kevin De Leon steps down in early 2018. When that happens Atkins will become the first woman and openly LGBT person to head the United States' largest state's upper legislative house.

De León, a Los Angeles Democrat who has served as Senate leader for nearly four years, is stepping down from the leadership position as he runs against Sen. Dianne Feinstein in the 2018 election for her seat in the U.S. Senate.

“Four years ago, our caucus elected the first Latino leader in over a century to lead the California state Senate — and, next year, Sen. Atkins will become our first ever woman to be elected Senate leader,” De León said in a statement. 

“Toni is a leader of great experience, achievement and integrity, and I have every confidence that she will lead America's most accomplished legislative chamber to even greater heights,” De León added. 

Atkins, 55, brings leadership experience to the job, having previously served as speaker of the state Assembly. She will be the third person to serve both as Assembly speaker and Senate president pro tem and the first leader of the state Senate who has come out as gay. 

“Today, I am humbled by the trust my colleagues have placed in me, and I intend to earn that trust every day by working tirelessly and inclusively to keep California a place of opportunity for everyone,” Atkins said in a statement.

Congratulations to Toni!

A new report on LGBT discrimination was released recently by National Public Radio. It was conducted jointly with Harvard Chan School of Public Health, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and NPR. The main result is that discrimination against LGBT people is pervasive in the United States.

The primary conclusion (on page 29-30 of the 64 page report) is excerpted here:

LGBTQ Americans report significant personal experiences of discrimination related to their sexual orientation or gender identity. In the context of individual or interpersonal discrimination, a majority of all LGBTQ people have personally experienced slurs (57%) or offensive comments (53%) about their sexual orientation or gender identity. Furthermore, a majority of all LGBTQ people say that they or an LGBTQ friend or family member have personally experienced threats or non-sexual harassment (57%), sexual harassment (51%), or violence (51%) because of their sexuality or gender identity, and 34% say they or an LGBTQ friend or family member have been harassed or questioned about their presence in a bathroom.  

In the context of institutional discrimination, at least one in five LGBTQ people report being personally discriminated against because of their sexuality or gender identity when applying for jobs (20%), when being paid equally or considered for promotions (22%), or when trying to rent a room or apartment or buy a house (22%). More than a quarter of LGBTQ people say that they or an LGBTQ friend or family member have been unfairly treated by the courts (26%) or by the police (26%) because of their LGBTQ identity.

I encourage you to read the entire report, "Discrimination in America: Experiences and Views of LGBTQ Americans," for yourself.

Danica Roem made history on Tuesday night by becoming the first transgender person elected to the Virginia House of Delegates as a Democrat. Some news outlets falsely were claiming that Roem was the first transgender person ever elected to a state legislature, unfortunately forgetting the historical achievement of Althea Garrison who was elected as a legislator in Massachusetts in 1993 (as a Republican!). The first out transgender person to be elected to a state legislature is Stacie Laughton who was elected in New Hampshire in 2012. Even as someone who has taught LGBT history multiple times I was unaware of Laughton's or Garrison's feats prior to this week so it is hard to fault the media in their error with Roem.

Another amazing aspect of Roem's victory is that she did it by soundly (54% to 45%) defeating Bob Marshall, who was a 13-term incumbent in the Virginia legislature and who is notoriously homophobic and transphobic and referred to by the Washington Post as the state's "most socially conservative state lawmaker." He refused to debate Roem and he and his party referred to Roem by the incorrect gender.

The special election to replace now-Congressman Jimmy Gomez in the 51st Assembly District happened this Tuesday October 3 and the top 2 finishers were Wendy Carrillo (who had also run against Gomez in the special election in the 34th Congressional District) and Luis López. Carrillo received the most votes (4,771) in a crowded field of 13 candidates while López was second with 4,086 and Mike Fong was close behind with 3,515.


Hat/tip to Los Angeles Times.

Paul Feinman joins an unfortunately small list of openly LGBT people who are members of their state's highest court. Feinman was appointed by Governor Andrew Cuomo to the New York Court of Appeals in June 2017.

Today's Queer Quote is from Brad Hoylman:

Senator Brad Hoylman, one of five openly gay members of New York's State Legislature who urged the governor to appoint an LGBT person to the Court of Appeals, called the confirmation "an important perspective that has been missing on the court." 

"It is a watershed moment for the LGBT rights in the state of New York," said Hoylman. "It comes at a time when gay rights are under assault from Washington, DC and LGBT people and their families feel under siege." 

Two of the seven candidates recommended to take the open seat were openly gay. But it was 57-year-old Feinman whose seat was confirmed amid Pride Month celebrations of the progress the LGBT community has made. He is the first openly LGBT justice to be confirmed in the Court of Appeal's 170-year history.

Congratulations to Paul Feinman!