Our program on February 12 will feature our own Leo Walters. His bio follows:
  “I am a member of PFLAG/KC and graduated Magna with a degree in Electronic Engineering.  Seeking social interaction and loving the relationships I was having with clients at the time, I continued my work in the financial industry.  I worked for Bank of America for several years, and moved to Ameriprise looking for a more comprehensive approach towards helping my clients.
   I have devoted a large portion of my practice to helping Gay and Lesbian couples and individuals.  In my field I focus on comprehensive financial planning.  It is my vision to help my clients achieve financial dignity and also help those that they care about.  I do this through utilizing a goal based approach, focusing very heavily on what the client would like to see happen from a financial perspective.
  Ideally, I would like to see everyone in the community operating at the highest capacity with their finances, as I believe that the stronger that each of us is financially, the more resources we have at our disposal to advance our political and social causes.
  My focus will be the legal, tax, and financial implications that face gay individuals.  I will spend time directly talking about estate planning and privacy issues, tax implications due to DOMA and our inability to marry, and wrap up with some of the financial implications that I see within the industry and my own client segment.
 
Personally, I currently serve on the steering committee for Aids Walk.  I also spend time working with single mothers in the area.  Growing up in a single parent household, I know some of the unique challenges that these parents face, and I greatly value the help that I am able to provide for them.”
 
   This should be a most informative program, so come and join us and bring your friends and loved ones.  It’s always a great time of info, eating and friendship. Meeting info at right
 

 

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From Our President

 

Vive le difference

As many of you know, I love, love, love music.  My taste has always been very eclectic-everything from blues to country to rap.  To illustrate this point I will tell you that the last two CD’s I bought were The Pussy Cat Dolls and Trisha Yearwood.  I am a sucker for lyrics that grip you (and it doesn’t hurt if it makes you wanna dance).  One such song is on Trisha’s latest entitled “Standing Out in a Crowd”.   It exemplifies the anxiety we all feel when simply trying to fit in.  The first time I heard it, I could hear my mother’s voice saying the same things to me-literally.  For all of our loved ones who might still be struggling to find their place in a “straight” society—remind them that it’s O.K. to stand out.  Here are the lyrics:

 

Mother said, “Stand up straight.  Don’t let your classmates make you feel like you don’t belong. So, you’re not like the rest of them, someday the best of them will realize they were wrong.” But in my world different meant lonely. The last place I wanted to be was…
Standing out in a crowd. Where the spotlight finds you and singles you out. What are they whispering about? You’re thinking up ways to take up less space. You can’t see the grace in it. Standing out in a crowd.
Too short, too tall.  The flower against the wall, the last one chosen to play. Too smart, too dumb.  Too strange a place to be from, same shoes everyday. With all these ways to be different then maybe that’s how you fit in by…
Standing out in a crowd where the spotlight finds you and singles you out. What are they whispering about? You’re thinking up ways to take up less space-Instead of embracing it. Standing out in a crowd.
It’s funny how now it’s not such a bad place to be….
Standing out in a crowd.  Standing out in a crowd.

 

I certainly remember feeling many of those same things but I hope I’ve passed some of my mother’s sage advice along to my kids—it’s not only to be different
It’s beautiful.
                                              Jamie Lee
 

 

 

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Mark Morford Column

Some of you may have already read this Mark
Morford column, but many of you have not.
 Please forgive me for taking this much space, but I really think it is worth taking the time to read it all...carefully.  It is a superb piece of writing, and the message hits the nail right on the head.
  Pass it on.  And if you have comments that you would like to share with the community via the newsletter, maybe we can begin a “letter to the editor” section.  

 

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Here Is The Big Gay Agenda Revealed! The horrifying secret plot to homo-amplify America. Also:  Dig this hetero agenda!
     By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, January 27, 2006

 

   I have spoken with my gay friends. I have been to yoga classes and men's health spas and Restoration Hardware, chic rug shops and the Castro Starbucks and really cute restaurants featuring mixed baby greens that cost $12. I have observed. I have taken notes. I have checked the fashions and the cars and the skin-tight T-shirts, the newsletters and the bumper stickers and the secret codes hidden within the rainbow flag.
    It is time to come clean. It is time to reveal the truth. After all, the religious right has been hammering at it for years, the pseudo-Christians and the homophobes and the sexually terrified all fully and truly believing that there is a plot, a massive, deep-seated agenda among the gay community not only to decriminalize and demystify homosexuality but to actually coerce and cajole and actively lure the
innocent white babies of America into the sordid and well-dressed "gay lifestyle," so much so that, much like aliens living in underground cities in Area 51, well, there must be something to it.
   Just look. Look at the wanton slew of nasty e-mails I received -
intermixed like bloody shrapnel amid a huge stack of gorgeous e-mail enthusiasm, mind -- in response to my recent column extolling the virtues of the heartbreaking, perspective-altering "Brokeback Mountain" phenom, wherein I dared to suggest that this spare and potent little film might actually help deflect the savage karmic pain of people like Samuel Alito and move the human experiment forward, just a little. What nerve I had.

 

"Mark, gay films move us back. To tell society, which includes
children, that to stick a penis inside someones anus, a wholly
unnatrual act is ok and normal is ubsurd. I don't hold anything
against gays, I'm not one to judge people, they can do what they
please, but to shove their pervertions down everyones throat, and to try to make it mainstream and teach children honosexualiy is a normal thing for people to do is sick". -- Steve W
   Or this:

 

"It is really hard to believe that people like yourself are gloating
over this film and are so proud of the degradation of our country
(USA) that you have joined the masses and are HELL BENT on the destruction of Christianity, family values, and everything that is decent and what our forefathers have fought and died for in this
country. Your kind are the real BIGOTS! You are the enemy of everything that is decent and good, you love death and destruction (that is what the homosexual lifestyle will lead to)..."-- Larry L

 

Isn't that sweet? Doesn't it make you feel good to be an American? Sure it does.
   But you know what? Adorably rabid, misguided homophobes like Steve and Larry, they might have a point after all. Because after all my observations and when I really allow myself to be honest, I become convinced of the existence of a truly shocking gay lifestyle, an actual gay agenda far more sinister than even desperately misguided and morally lost people like Steve and Larry can comprehend.
   Do you know what it is? Do you want to know the real gay agenda, what 96.8 percent of all gay couples wish for every single day including  Sunday? Here it is:
   From what I can glean and above all else, the gay people of America seem to want this simply inexcusable level of boundless, unchecked normalcy. It's true. For some reason, they believe the utterly disgusting idea that they should be able to live their lives in peace and trust and health, with full support and assistance from their schools and hospitals and government, just like everyone else. I know.
Shudder.
   It is, in fact, remarkably similar to what heteros want. And women.  And black people. And immigrants. And dwarves. That is, to be able to fall in love and maybe even get married (or at least have the option) and have decreasing amounts of sex and raise a family and hold down a good job and pay their taxes and argue with their lovers over who the hell spent 200 bucks on long distance to their mother, all while not having to worry about getting the living crap beaten out of them with tire chains by Arkansas and Alabama and most of Texas, or secretly loathed by small-minded pseudo-Christians who wouldn't know Jesus' true message if it bit them on the other cheek.

 

Ah, the deviousness of it all, the sheer nerve to desire the same sort of lives as everyone else. But do you want to know the kicker? The true aspect of the "gay agenda" that makes the religious right's skin really crawl? Here it is: When all of that normalcy is in place, when these repulsive gay beings who like to walk around in public and eat at restaurants and drink their lattes and laugh out loud and stick things into each other's bodies for sexual pleasure, well, they want the most appalling thing of all: They just want to be left alone.
   I know. It's hideous. How dare they! How dare most gays ask not to be harassed and not really care to flaunt their sexuality or convince anyone that homosexuality is cool or righteous or the only way to be, beyond reassuring children that it's OK to be whatever religion or sexual orientation your mind and body and heart and soul guide you to be. Can you imagine? What horror. Ignorant, intolerant schoolteachers should protest that nasty idea right now. Oh wait.

 

This is, in fact, the most sinister gay agenda of all. Normalcy. Lack
of fear. Happiness. The right to be miserably in love just like everyone else and have it recognized by the culture as, well, no big deal. Safe. Healthy. Beautiful, even. What nerve.

 

To Steve and Larry's great dismay, gay people do not seem to care in the slightest for converting anyone to homosexuality, which of course would be the equivalent of converting a frying pan into a doorknob. It simply cannot be done. It's bitterly sad that this must be repeated so frequently in terms so simple that even Steve and Larry can comprehend, but gayness is no more a lifestyle choice than is blond hair or blood type or that knowledge, deep down in your skin, that Bush is raping the soul of the nation. It just is.

 

Much can be learned from this shocking revelation. Much we can glean from the gay agenda's "true" motivations -- most notably in how it contrasts with the famed and beloved Christian neoconservative heterosexual agenda, the one that instructs that you please keep your mouth shut and blindly believe in the same bitter God as everyone else, and by the way please bury your true sexuality and get married at 23 and pop out six kids and become quickly and quietly miserable and gain 30 pounds and stop having sex entirely and get divorced at 50 and wake up just in time to watch yourself die.

 

Oh my yes, that has proven to be just so much better, hasn't it, Steve? Larry?