Dear Editor:

Homophobic Rev George Stevens has said that he’s running for appointment to the vacant Fourth District San Diego City Council seat. I’m disgusted that he was campaigning at Charles Lewis’s funeral. Somebody should challenge Stevens’ twelve prior City Council years as fully termed out.

Jay Murley

Dear Editor:

Your editorial in a recent Gay & Lesbian Times (Raised Flags) asked a couple of questions. The first was regarding the use of a Transgender Flag and a Bisexual flag in conjunction with our Rainbow flag. You did not mention the flag of the Leather community which has also been in use for quite some time.

In my opinion, the use of multiple flags in our community in no way detracts from our Rainbow flag but rather enhances it. The use of other flags shows our diversity; the use of the Rainbow flag shows our unity. Individual flags representing several of our groups is no different from state flags. Each state has a star on our national flag yet each state also has its own flag.

Now for your second question regarding the use of GLBT. Until the early 70s the term for all sexuality outside the mainstream was Gay. At that time it was considered offensive to call a Gay woman a Lesbian. Lesbians reclaimed the term Lesbian and insisted that it be used as their preferred label. Then Bisexual and Transgender people asked to be included with the labels that they prefer. GBLT is incomplete. It doesn’t include the Intersex folk. When I speak, for the sake of convenience, I usually refer to the Gay community meaning everybody. When I write I use our initials in alphabetical order so as not to play favorites (BGILT). Some of the youth I spend time with use BGILTQQ, the first Q being Queer and the second Q meaning Questioning. Many of those youth use Queer as an umbrella term.

I also, when writing, capitalize the names of the individual groups that make up our BGILTQQ community. It is a sign of respect. We capitalize nationalities, surely we are as important a community as any nationality.

Ed Burditt

Dear Editor:

In an article essentially about how/why gay men ID w/ female superheroes, I suppose that any lesbian take on the same phenomenon is going to be superficial at best. However, if you are going to report a lesbian perspective, might it not be better to have actual lesbians state their views, and not have gay men guessing at same?

Such a Real Live lesbian perspective might have given you the actual reasons lesbians were into Xena, Warrior Princess for example. To wit, while gay men (not to mention straight ones!) might debate “Xena versus Gabrielle” in terms of sex appeal (“aggressive, kick-ass” and “barbarian” as opposed to “cute blond with abs of steel,” and “probably more approachable and accessible”), lesbians were grooving on the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle (well, yeah: we were getting off on them physically, also. It’s just not all about abs and breastplates! g). Y’know, that Romance Thang we women are so famously into? Well, just like our het sisters, we look for it in our fictional couples too!

Just thought you might like to know.

Juliana Fisher

Dear Editor:

“All this ignores the fact that gay men are no longer the group most at risk for contracting AIDS.” This statement taken from recent article in GLT is not entirely true. Have you ever been in a bathhouse? Drugs are rampant, mostly speed, but others as well, barebacking is commonplace and they think nothing of it.

Unless we stop calling it safe, safer whatever sex, we will continue to become infected, and those that bareback are at a greater risk as they can create a super strain for which there is no treatment.

It’s time for the Gay community to wake up and start encouraging abstinence as a viable alternative. There is no such thing as safe sex and the term safer sex is questionable.

Even among the so-called support social groups, barebacking is commonplace, POZabilities is one of those groups. I might ask you to stealthily join one of the groups and see for yourself what is actually going on.

A lot of the advertising in our Gay publications also encourage this behavior, one look in them will tell you, there are about sex, different ways to have it, different ways to enhance it, half naked young men on the cover etc....why is there not a more concerted effort made for legit advertising? I’m sure if our newspapers tried to present a better face, then more mainstream business’ would support the papers by advertising. I mean if you look in the Union Tribune, LA Times, NY Times, Wallstreet Journal, you are not baraged by endless advertising for clubs, sex, and dating....it is something to look at.

If you were to ask straight people what they find offensive about Gays they would answer they are most promiscuous, hedonistic etc. Why, because that is what they see in our publications, in our films, in our parades, the list goes on. What they do not see are people quietly living their lives shopping at the Piggly Wiggly, or Ralphs, taking care of their cars, their families, etc. It is something to think about.

Ron Mason

Dear Editor:

Since I was out of town and didn’t get your 8-5-2004 issue until Wednesday night, I want to respond to the “dated” (and inaccurate) information about the Rainbow Flag that was in the editorial. I was both surprised and disappointed at the following misinformation regarding the Rainbow Flag (copied from YOUR article):

“Designed by our community’s Gilbert Baker, a San Francisco artist and our community’s true Betsy Ross, the rainbow flag features eight stripes: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. Baker, who is reportedly still in San Francisco making rainbow flags, has said that the colors stand for sexuality, life, healing, sun, nature, art, harmony and spirit.

The flag was created in 1978, and in 1979 San Francisco’s GLBT community was devastated by the assassination of Harvey Milk, the city’s beloved first openly gay supervisor. In need of a unifying symbol, the San Francisco community reportedly adopted the rainbow flag as a symbol of sorrow, strength and unity for the city’s 1979 Pride parade. Not surprisingly, the flag’s use has since spread and it’s become internationally recognizable.

Aren’t the shared values of sexuality, life, healing, sun, nature, art, harmony and spirit appropriate for all of us – gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender folks? And isn’t this history one we all find meaning in and identify with?”

While it’s true that it began with eight stripes, that soon was changed to the now-accepted and officially-recognized six stripes. Did you reaslly see people carrying eight-striped flags in the Pride Parade the weekend before? I am doubtful of that, because I have yet to spot them in the parade contingents.

I appreciate the thought-provoking article about the differences / similarities of our community’s flags. However, I wish a little more extensive fact-checking had been done to accurately reflect the history of this significant and so visible symbol!

Sharon K Parker

Dear Editor:

Coward and spineless wimp. Wuss. Jackass. These are the terms you applied to Mayor Murphy in your article (“We Need a Hero, Not a Zero”) in Issue 868 of the GLT after referring to him as a “girlie man”.

Wait. You said you considered calling him a girlie man (which you did do by telling us that you considered it) until “some of the women around the office took offense to being lumped into the same category” as the mayor. As a woman I take more offense to a man who you label a wimpy, spineless, jackass wuss being in my category. Calling someone a girlie man is likening him to a girl (woman), is it not?

Leave the gender references to someone who doesn’t know better than to make them (I expect it from the Governor, who can’t seem to learn from his mistakes—not from an editor of a gay publication!) and just call Mayor Murphy the names that apply to his conduct (fence-sitting coward who won’t take a stand because he is unsure of which is the stronger group of his constituents, gays or gay-haters.)

Lisa Fisher