The Advocate March/April 2022

IT’S A BALMY FIRST DAY of March for those of us in Los Angeles, and The Advocate’s staffers are wrapping our Entertainment issue. But there are distractions. Big ones. The Ukrainian people are fearlessly fighting a Russian invasion ordered by antigay tyrant Vladimir Putin. Here in the U.S., Republicans in Florida are pushing the odious “don’t say gay” bill that would endanger the lives of LGBTQ+ students and force teachers back into the closet. Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has launched an attack on trans kids, equating gender-affirming care with child abuse. President Joe Biden is delivering his State of the Union, the first time in the event’s history that a president is flanked by two women — Vice President Kamala Harris and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He calls on Congress to…

NEW RESEARCH offers more credence to nature over nurture when it comes to sexuality, specifically finding that those with older brothers are more likely to enter a same-sex union in their lifetimes. Researchers Christine Ablaza, Jan Kabátek, and Francisco Perales published their recent findings in The Journal of Sex Research. They used data from more than 9 million people in Dutch population registers. While the data used didn’t indicate a person’s sexual orientation, it did show if the p er s on had entered into a same-sex marriage or civil partnership. The researchers used these unions as a “proxy for homosexuality,” they wrote in a piece for The Conversation. The researchers say they found clear evidence of a fraternal birth order effect on homosexuality or bisexuality. This theory, which has been around…

A quarter of transgender adults in the U.S. face food insufficiency, three times the amount reported by cisgender adults. In a study by the University of California, Los Angeles’s Williams Institute, food insufficiency is defined as sometimes or often not having enough to eat within the past seven days. Researchers found that 25 percent of trans people experienced food insufficiency compared to only 8 percent of cis people, using data collected from July to October of last year in the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. Williams Institute researchers also found that almost six times as many trans people of color as white cis people experienced food insufficiency at some point in the summer and fall of 2021. Additionally, for the 32 percent of trans adults living below the poverty line, food insecurity —…

Chambersburg, Pa., has become the first municipality in the state to repeal an LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination ordinance. The Borough Council adopted the ordinance last October when it had a Democratic majority. However, a Republican majority was voted back in last November. Chambersburg, a town of about 20,000 people in south-central Pennsylvania, was the 70th and most recent municipality in the state to enact such a law. State law does not cover anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination. The repealed ordinance had banned discrimination in employment, housing, and public accommodation for people in the borough on the basis of race, color, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), religion, religious creed or belief, ancestry, national origin, familial status, marital status, age, veteran status, and mental or physical disability. Laws like the Chambersburg ordinance are needed to ensure equal access to…

A lesbian member of the West Virginia Air National Guard is suing for discrimination because, she says, she was urged to grow her hair longer, use makeup, and generally appear more feminine if she wanted her career to advance. Tech. Sgt. Kristin Kingrey has been in the guard for 14 years in both military and civilian posts. While deployed to Qatar in 2019, she applied for a full-time civilian position in the human resources office in Charleston, where she had been working part-time. She interviewed and was hired, but while waiting to start the job, she learned that a superior officer had told the chair of the interview panel that Kingrey should make her appearance more conventionally feminine, or else her career would suffer, according to the lawsuit. Kingrey was soon told…

Pride Toronto came under fire in January when a former member of the organization accused the group of mismanaging and mispresenting how it handled federal grant money, specifically for projects related to Indigenous queer programs. York University professor and former Pride Toronto member Tom Hooper posted tweets he said showed inconsistencies and other issues in the group’s reporting to the Canadian government. In his investigation, Hooper said he found unauthorized letters of support submitted with grant applications, references to an Indigenous artist’s involvement even after he’d left the project, and commitments to Indigenous communities that weren’t honored. “Though [the investigation] started as a project on the myths of decriminalization [of homosexuality] in 1969, I discovered another story of potentially manipulated documents, misdirection of funds, and other unethical conduct,” Hooper wrote on Twitter. In…