World AIDS Day

As most everyone knows, tomorrow is World AIDS Day. This day holds very powerful significance to me as an HIV-Positive person. I am so glad that we have this day to remind us that HIV/AIDS is truly the world pandemic that it is. The stigma associated with the disease can be quite overwhelming especially in certain areas. As such, I have started a Yahoo! Group specifically for HIV-Positive Arkansans (see links to join) to serve as a communication tool whereby we can share information, promote events, and support one another.

I hope that everyone will take time to consider how HIV/AIDS has impacted their lives in great and small ways and how we, in turn, can have an impact on the fight against the disease and the impact it has on so many lives.

Tomorrow I will be going to Conway to join PRISM (UCA’s gay-straight alliance) at their World AIDS Day event (see event description below). I have a very special place in my heart for our gay youth. I remember the pain and isolation I felt as a young gay man in an intolerant environment and I would very much like to support our youth programs as they strive to make this a better world for our gay and lesbian young people. Tomorrow I will get to participate in an event that combines two issues very near and dear to me--- gay youth and HIV/AIDS--- I can think of no better way to observe World AIDS Day, can you?


PRISM World AIDS Day event description (thanks to Amanda Harris for the invitation)

World Aids Day is this Friday, December 1. PRISM has been asked to be a part of an event being planned by the UCA Rotaract Club and co-coordinated by several UCA organizations including PRISM.

PRISM was able to get two panel speakers for the forum-style discussion and presentation to be held this Friday.

Where: Brewer-Hegemann Conference center at UCA
When: Friday, Dec. 1 6PM

The bios on the speakers we invited are as follows:

Cornelius Mabin, native Arkansan attended Arkansas State University and Philander Smith College. In 1983, Mr. Mabin served as the first African-American president of the state's GLBT advocacy group, Arkansas Gay Rights and testified before the Arkansas Legislature on issues concerning group diversity on state college campuses. AGR bestowed Mabin with it's 1983 Outstanding Performance Award.

Black and White Men Together, Inc. at its national convention in
1985 recognized Mr. Mabin with a Personal Achievement Award citing his work and dedication in addressing homophobia, interracial unity and his participation in the Healing Racism Institute in Columbus, Ohio.

His human rights activism has also included lobbying Arkansas' 2004 Capitol Hill Congressional delegation on the issue of AIDS funding in the state, engaging community outreach as a past Pride week chairman, various media appearances and former Arkansas AIDS Foundation board member.

A prolific writer, essayist and commentator, Mr. Mabin has contributed numerous works to a host of publications, and now produces CorneliusOnpoint, (www.corneliusonpoint.blogspot. com) featuring The Body Politic, an online multi-platform website featuring items of interest to the GLBT community and beyond.


Eric Reece, is a Same-Gender Loving/Queer identified Black male living in Little Rock AR. Currently, he is the coordinator for PALS- Central Arkansas' Same-Gender Loving/ LGBTQ and allies youth and young adult support program and serves of the board of the Center for Artistic Revolution a non-profit organization that works to dismantle oppressions by education and cultural arts. Eric has worked as an advocate, activist, organizer and educator for over 12 years in the areas of sexual health/comprehensive sex education, SGL/LGBTQ issues, hate/bias motivated violence and anti-oppression. He is the former executive director of the Arkansas Equality Network Arkansas' LGBTQ advocacy organization, and program director for Brothas and Sistas, a community organization dedicated to HIV/STD prevention within Arkansas Black community.

We should all make sure to be there for this event so that the UCA and Conway communities understand that homosexuality/ bisexuality, poverty, and race are all very important components of AIDS... and we want to be representatives of those in the Queer community who are no longer with us because of AIDS."

Show us your Pride!

Just in time for the Christmas shopping season!

Little Rock Capital Pride is proud to bring back our Café Press store. Get all your Capital Pride merchandise by shopping in one easy to use location. We have shirts, mugs, clocks, posters, etc…

Visit our Café Press store now to start shopping: http://www.cafepress.com/lrcapitalpride

This is an awesome way for us to raise money and get our name out there! Here is my personal wish list :)

A Positive Perspective

Blogger friends:

I have the distinct honor of being a guest blogger for http://www.littlerockpride.com My handle is "A Positive Perspective"-- a play on words relating to the fact that I am HIV+ and try to maintain a positive mental attitude. LittleRockPride.com is absolutely one of my favorite sites and I believe that it is a real service to our local GLBT community. Barb, the site's owner, is my friend and Vice President of LRCP. So check out my blog in the guest blog section and hope you enjoy!

Native Son

I met Brian Sprague (pictured above in Citilife St. Petersburg) at the InterPride world conference and discovered that he was originally from Arkansas (one of five native Arkansans that I met there). Brian currently lives in St. Petersburg, Florida but returned home this week for the holiday. Brian serves on the Board for St. Pete Pride and is very active doing PR/Media Relations with AIDSWALK St. Petersburg. Last night, I met up with Brian and Dr. Dean Blevins, Board President of Arkansas AIDS Foundation so Brian could share some ideas of how we can grow our walk (to be held June 2nd—my birthday, the day before pride—mark your calendars :). We had a great meeting and I can not begin to tell you what an honor it was for me to get the chance to get better acquainted with these guys. One of the true perks of volunteering is that you get to associate with some of the most interesting, caring, dedicated and uplifting people (and it doesn’t hurt that both of these guys are VERY easy on the eyes!). I am very motivated to work more with the foundation and I can’t wait to see Brian again at the POSE (Prides of the SouthEast) conference this February.

Giving Thanks

Today’s blog is actually a comment that I posted in response to an article on littlerockpride.com titled “It’s Thanksgiving week, let’s be grateful”

As someone that moved home to Arkansas this year I am very thankful for the community building within the GLBT community. I remember coming out here in 1992 and had no outlet to meet other gay people except for Backstreet and Discovery (not that I didn't LOVE to patronize these bars). I remember attending the first meeting of the Arkansas Gay and Lesbian Task Force that ultimately didn't go very far. I am proud to see the strides that our community has made in a little over a decade. I am thankful for this site, for our Pride groups, for the grassroot activists, GLBT political groups, our GLBT print magazines, our future leaders in our gay/straight alliances and college groups, of Kathy Webb and the hope she embodies for our community and ACLU-Arkansas and the legal victories they have won for us.

By Request

At the InterPride conference, I had the opportunity to meet Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God. (see links). Ironically enough, it was because of Joe that I was at the conference in the first place. I had a copy of Pride magazine (Atlanta edition) and I called up the publisher to inquire how we could get a Little Rock version in the future. I was referred to Joe and he turned me on to InterPride--- fast forward about three months and we are both at the InterPride World Conference. Anyway, Joe and I traded a few emails and he shared that he was a blogger. Come to find out, he is this uber-famous, totally hilarious....well, blogger-god. If you haven't seen his blog, you are missing out. Today he asked that his fellow bloggers re-post the following message.........Who am I to deny the blogger-god?

From Joe.My.God
"It was at this time last week that the last bell finally rang on the 2006 election, delivering the House, the Senate, and the majority of state governships into the hands of the Democrats. The map is blue again. And so is the sky. My face is sore from smiling and my feets are aching from all this happy dancing.And playing a possibly vital, perhaps pivotal role in this triumph was not a politician. Not a party strategist. It was a private citizen. It was a gay man. A man who although he was risking his personal livelihood, risking his arrest, and surely risking his physical safety, he came forward and did the right thing at the right time.That man is Mike Jones.Regardless of your personal opinions regarding Jones' chosen field of work, you cannot ignore his unprecedented accomplishment of almost completely upending the Republican Party's last minute campaign to divert the nation's attention from the true issue of the election: the Iraq war.Talking Heads: "The terrorists have just blah blah....gay marriage referendum blah blah....stem cell legislation blah blah...millions of illegal immigrants blah blah. Um, wait a minute. We have a breaking bulletin: Pastor Ted Haggard! Head of evangelical movement! Homosexual! Prostitution! Crystal meth! Close to the President! More! More! More! More!"Repeat on every channel.Headlines on every paper.For five days.The five days BEFORE the election.All the billionaire George Soroses in the world could not have more effectively eclipsed the Republicans' usual last minute diversionary tactics. It was pure delicious serendipity. It was kismet. And most of all, it was KARMA, baby.We'll never know the exact impact that Mike Jones' revelations had on the national election. He came forward specifically because Ted Haggard was hypocritically supporting Colorado's anti-gay referendum. That referendum passed, anyway. And Jones probably didn't fathom that his story would balloon into a national media orgy and image nightmare for the RNC and President Bush. Jones could not have predicted that his little sex & drugs scandal might have spun unknowable legions of wavering digusted red staters over to blue country.But it happened. Don't we all want to believe it happened? That it surely helped, maybe, a LOT?I've been in contact with Mike over the last week. He tells me that the major gay rights organizations have extended nothing but ten-foot poles. He is unemployed and I imagine that for at least the short future, he is unemployable. He is facing the potential of huge legal bills. He has received death threats from Haggard's followers and other peace-loving Christians.Gentle readers, you and I owe Mike Jones a debt of gratitude. It's a different country than it was seven days ago, and even if you think that Mike Jones had only the tiniest part in effecting that change, we OWE him. Remember those last two Senate seats were decided by just a few thousand votes each.So please, show your thanks.Go to PayPal's Send Money screen and throw some love to our unlikely hero, using his email account: "massageandmuscle@aol.com" If you ran into Mike Jones in a bar, wouldn't you insist on buying his drinks? There's thousands and thousands of you out there in JMG-land, and I'm willing to bet that you too have sore faces from smiling and aching feet from all that happy dancing. Show some appreciation to the man who might have helped put that smile on your face and the blue back on that map.If you don't have a PayPal account, they are free and take less than 1 minute to set up. You can send cash directly to Mike from your ATM or credit cards. Send him the $10 you would have spent buying him drinks, if you ran into him in a bar. Send him the $20 you would have spent buying his dinner in a restaurant. Send him $50, $100, maybe more, if you think that maybe, just maybe, Mike Jones had a hand in changing the political landscape of our nation, and possibly, just possibly, a war.And even if you don't buy any of the above, if you don't think what Jones did had ANY effect on the election, you should thank him. Thank him just for the sheer entertainment of the last week. Thank him for exposing the ugly hypocrisy of the evangelical movement. That alone, is worth a ten-spot. At least.Bonus: As reward for helping Mike Jones, here's a special new vocal recording of that instant classic, Supertelevangelistic Sex-and-Drugs Psychosis, lyrics by M. Spaff Sumision, vocals by Robert Lund. Download that to your iPod and throw some bucks to Mike Jones while you laugh."

I just had to share the new banner ad for Little Rock Capital Pride. Isn't it AWESOME?!

To Russia, with love.

As I have shared before, I recently attended the InterPride World Conference. At the conference I had the pleasure of rooming with Dmitri Bartenev. I will let the following post from Joe.My.God tell you more about Dmitri.


From Joe.My.God.

At a banquet in Portland on Friday night, I had the pleasure of being seated next Dmitri Bartenev, of Moscow Gay Pride, which bravely attempted to stage its first-ever Pride march earlier this year, despite the parade having been banned by Moscow's mayor. The marchers proceeded anyway, attempting to lay a wreath of flowers at Russia's Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier. Russia's religious leaders had called for violence against the marchers, who were attacked along the route by skinheads, resulting in many injuries. Police arrested 50-100 of the marchers for violating the mayor's edict banning gay people from gathering in public.At a meeting before our banquet, when Bartenev introduced himself to a room of 200 gay activists, the entire group lept to their feet with a sustained and tearful ovation. Bartenev is a lawyer and works in Russia to advance the causes of people with mental disabilities, including gay people who have been charged with being mentally unfit due to their homosexuality. He recently won a landmark case in St.Petersburg, defending a soldier who'd been discharged as mentally ill because he was gay…………………………

………………………….Dmitri Bartenev, gay hero. “



Today, I saw the following article from a link off of LittleRockPride.com (shameless plug: I am now a guest blogger on this site. So, check out A Positive Perspective in the guest blog section).

From RainbowNetwork.com

London 12 November 2006 - The Russian gay activist Nicolai Alekseev has vowed to fight on after Moscow Pride 2006 was officially banned by Moscow's mayor and the protest about this was disrupted.
In a moving and inspiring speech to his audience at the Gay & Lesbian Humanist Association's annual lunch in London on Saturday, Alekseev described the hostility which participants in Moscow Pride 2006 had to face from a coalition of fascist thugs and Orthodox Christian religionsts. He said they had been "bloodied but unbowed" and would certainly be back with a vengeance in 2007.
Given time, he predicted, the situation for LGBT peoplein Russia would be as favourable as it is now in Western European countries. His speech was received with an ecstatic ovation and he was presented with an award in recognition of "his courage in challenging homophobia in Russia and beyond".
Later Alekseev expressed his delight at the recognition expressed by Sir Elton John in The Observer Music Monthly that in countries such as Poland, Latvia and Russia "there is a huge anti-gay movement and a lot of it is started by the Church", and that he, Jake Shears of the Scissors Sisters, and the Pet Shop Boys, should play a Gay Pride concert in Russia.
A lawyer who lives and works in Moscow, Alekseev is the founder and head of Project Gay Russia and the executive secretary of the International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO). He has been actively challenging homophobia in Russia for the last four years and took a leading role in the planning of Moscow Pride. He has also has been very active in campaigns in other Eastern European countries, notably Latvia.
The Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GALHA) flew him in from Moscow to speak at its public meeting concerning homophobia in Eastern Europe on 10 November and its annual lunch as guest-of-honour and keynote speaker on 11 November.
At the meeting, which was held at London's Conway Hall, he was joined on the panel of speakers by journalist Andy Harley, GALHA's Derek Lennard, the UKco-ordinator for the International Day Against Homophobia, Peter Tatchell of OutRage! and Jason Pollock, the executive director of London Pride."


To Dmitri, Nicolai and all of our Russian brothers and sisters in Pride…….Fight on!

Cinema Pride

Last night I attended the first screening of Cinema Pride, a GLBT movie group at Easy Street in Little Rock. The movie we watched was Long Term Relationship, an independent film written/directed/produced by Rob Williams. All-in-all, it was a good movie and I am very glad we have another forum to bring the community together. I met up with David and Chad (LRCP’s president and treasurer) to watch the movie and we had the chance to chat before and after the movie. It was so great to spend time with these guys outside of our usual meeting setting and to hear about Boo Bash (which I missed from being out of town), Eureka Springs’ Diversity Weekend and to fill them in on the InterPride conference. We probably talked more last night than we have in the entire six months I have known them! David had asked me to bring him back a lobster from Maine, so I gave him a stuffed lobster on a stick that we had used for voting at the conference and I think he really liked it. We have our next meeting of Little Rock Capital Pride tomorrow and I can’t wait to see the entire group!

My (protest) vote

For the first time in 14 years, I cast my vote as an Arkansan. I must confess that I did not get nearly as involved in this campaign as I have in years past. The primary reason for my lack of participation was being "out of the loop" on the local political front. I firmly resolve to change this in the future. It was my great honor to cast my vote for Vic Snyder in the congressional race. Many years ago, I was a waiter/bartender at El Chico's on Geyer Springs Road in Little Rock and Vic was a regular patron. I had the opportunity on many occassions to chat with him and we developed a strong rapport. I don't know how the topic of me being gay came up, but I will never forget his words of encouragement. He is truly a class act and I believe that he is a remarkable asset for our state.

I struggled with my decision on who to vote for in the governor's race. There was never a chance I would vote for Asa Hutchinson, but I debated long and hard about the other choices. I am generally a loyal Democrat and in most cases vote for my party's candidate. However, I was so disgusted by Mike Beebe's flip-flopping on the gay foster parent issue that I had to truly wrestle with how to cast my vote. My first instinct was to vote for the lesser of two evils, but I evntually decided to vote for Jim Lendall, the Green party candidate. I know that many people will say that I wasted my vote on someone with no chance of winning or (worse) that I have helped Asa's bid for the top post. However, I feel that if we continue to elect Democrats that don't support our community, then we give them no incentive whatsoever to do so. I know that in the past, Georgia Equality, a gay political group I was a member of in Atlanta, had asked its membership to abstain voting for either candidate when they were found lacking on gay issues. I had considered abstaining totally, but then I remembered that Jim Lendall had attended Capital Pride and had spoken to the group. Now, I am not generally a single-issue voter, but to me I decided that it would be worth sending a message to the political community at-large that the gay vote is not to be discounted! I encourage everyone to vote their conscience today and I hope that we have a major shift in the balance of power. God Bless America where we have the right to vote--- may we all exercise this right thoughtfully.