Fafafini [Samoa]

Ivan Monforte from Smack Mellon on Vimeo.

Nike Native-Textile Inspired High Top

10 LGBT Teen Novels That Address Bullying and Suicide

Atlanta based writer Collin Kelley compiled a list of 10 LGBTQ teen novels that involve bullying and suicide, and has posted them on Autostraddle. One thing I love about Autostraddle is that they make it a point to not be obnoxiously Eurocentric. Kuddos to them! Here are some of the books they suggest:

Down to the Bone 

by Mayra Lazara Dole

 

A Cuban-American girl in a Catholic school is expelled and abandoned by her mother after they discover she is a lesbian.

A Scout is Brave

by Greg Novak

A Native American is bullied at a Boy Scout summer camp as he faces his own sexuality and the traditions of his family.

Finlater

by Shawn Stewart Ruff

A book for older teens and adults, this story of a young Black American teen and his Jewish boyfriend in 1969 is sexually frank and shows that bigotry and bullying roots are deep.

Hello Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks and Other Outlaws

by Kate Bornstein

The celebrated transgender writer offers up suggestions from the witty to the controversial, but all with one simple message: “Don’t be mean.”

The National Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Suicide Hotline:  

1-866-4-U-TREVOR

Two-Spirit

We-Wa, a Zuni two-spirit, weaving ca. 1871 - ca. 1907

Until the 1990s, the word berdache was used in English-language anthropological and ethnographical literature to describe a widely divergent set of social statuses found in many Native American tribal cultures, but which have been largely incomprehensible to Eurocentric observers, who have attempted to describe berdachism as a combination of homosexuality and transvestism. In recent years, Native Americans and the people who study them have proposed the term two-spirit as a more appropriate label.

Berdache is not a Native American term. According to linguist Claude Courouve, the word derives from the Persian bardaj; via European contact with the Muslim world, the word spread by the early sixteenth century to Italian as bardasso, to Spanish as bardaxa or bardaje, and to French as bardache.

Berdache is a relatively recent Anglophonic corruption of this term, which was defined in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French dictionaries as “a young man who is shamefully abused” or “a young man or boy who serves as another’s succubus, permitting sodomy to be committed on him.”

Early Spanish and French explorers and colonizers in North America applied these terms as a means of making sense of the relationships, anatomical sex, sexual behavior, and social gender role of those individuals they encountered who fell outside their own conceptual frameworks.

Berdachism was well known to anthropologists of North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but discussion of it was most often relegated to footnotes in general texts. Famed anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, a student of Franz Boas and founding figure in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, did extensive ethnographic fieldwork on berdachism among California tribes. This work reportedly informed The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), a popular science fiction novel set on a world with a complex gender system in which individuals change sex over the course of their life span, which was written by Kroeber’s daughter, Ursula K. Le Guin.

Interest in berdachism among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender scholars began with the publication, in Jonathan N. Katz’s Gay American History (1976), of several ethnographic descriptions discovered in archival source materials. Over the past several decades, a large body of literature on the phenomenon has been produced by Charles Callender and Lee Kochems, Walter Williams, Will Roscoe, Beatrice Medicine, Evelyn Blackwood, Sabine Lang, and others.

Contemporary investigators of two-spirit traditions have documented their existence in 150 tribes for males, and roughly half that number for females. According to Will Roscoe, key features of these traditions include economic specializations (handcrafts and domestic work for males; warfare, hunting, and leadership roles for females); supernatural sanction (in the form of authorization through dreams and visions for adopting the atypical role); and gender variation (relative to normative expectations for males and females in a given society).

Same-sex erotic behavior is no longer considered a definitive marker of two-spirit status, although homosexuality (defined here as sexual relations involving two individuals of the same anatomical sex, regardless of their social gender) is common.

Historically, two-spirit people typically have been well integrated into the life of their tribes, and have often held revered and honored positions within them. Because of homophobia in the dominant cultures of North America, some aspects of two-spirit traditions have been suppressed or lost. Members of native cultures are often quite reluctant to discuss two-spirit traditions with outsiders, who they feel may misunderstand them or appropriate them for their own agendas.

http://www.glbtq.com/ 

SIDE NOTE: F*CK A COLUMBUS.

 The Gang's All Queer

Teen Suicides and the Gap We All Experience

It seems that in the wake of bullying-awareness in general (which didn’t become a nation-wide issue until Phoebe Prince), LGBTQ teens are finally getting more visible support. And though a television broadcast will not comfort teens when they’re in their school corridors, hopefully it will force those with the power to be a good Samaritan to be just that. Nevertheless, too many names are being left out of the discussion. When supportive people list a few names of those whose lives we’ve lost, what color are nearly all the faces?

Carl Walker-Hoover

I have a few names that I’d like to mention and remember. People of color who cater to their own communities have long been seen as self-segregators, unpatriotic and hatemongers (i.e., Arizona). I’m not listing these names because I don’t value the lives of my white brothers and sisters. I list these names because the media does not value the lives of my colored brothers and sisters. One of my favorite quotes of all time is “we stand for what we stand for, not what we stand against.” This blog exists to fill a gap. Not segregate. And I will continue to fill that gap until latino, black, native, arab and asian faces are universal, too. Unfortunately, these are all that I could find in terms of teenagers. I'll continue to update and expand this list. I ask those of you who know names of others (INCLUDING WOMEN AND TRANS FOLK!) we’ve lost to please share.

Carl Walker-Hoover http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=7366805

Raymond Chase

Aiyisha Hassan http://www.metroweekly.com/news/?ak=5654

And I’m not saying that people who fail to address these victims are doing it intentionally or because they are prejudiced. But what I am saying is that the media holds a lot of power. And the power of omission is a bitch. Just imagine if all the major news networks neglected to report on the Haiti earthquake. Now take the dozens (maybe hundreds) of LGBTQ teens lost to suicide this year, and consider how the major news networks primarily report on white deaths. Teens of all colors are looking for a sign. They can find the story when we’re criminals/suspected criminals, can’t they?


Do the iReport Challenge:

If you support the mission to end anti-LGBT bullying around the world, do one or more of the following:
- Put on purple, take a photo or video of yourself and upload it to iReport
- Change your Twitter profile or Facebook page to purple
- Tweet: I’m wearing purple to end anti-LGBT bullying. #spiritday #BeAHero
- Record a video for the “It Gets Better” YouTube project (Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was the latest to join the campaign. See also Barack Obama)

The National Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Suicide Hotline:  

1-866-4-U-TREVOR