The Morning After

1. The Ellen & Portia Show Roundup:

ellenportia_4 eHarmony Suddenly a Proud Sponsor of World’s Most Famous Lesbian Couple (@queerty)

Ellen DeGeneres interviews Portia de Rossi: “The whole episode was another one of those quietly revolutionary moments. You just have to read all the gushing tweets about the interview from people across America to see how many people, gay and straight, were charmed by their appearance on the show together today.” (@afterellen)

See America, a couple is a couple is a couple – especially when they try to karaoke together. (@dorothy surrenders)

2. An Oklahoma teacher has been fired for showing her class The Laramie Project — after seeing the 2002 film about the murder of Matthew Shepard, students chose to film scenes themselves as a class project. The principal called it off: “After students protested, she held a 20-minute ceremony in a nearby park in which students wrote their thoughts and rolled them into helium balloons, then released them.” Amazing. (@usa today)

3. Houston, we have a problem: “One of the only groups that showed an increase in voting for the Republican Party in the 2008 election cycle was GLBTs.” (@pam’s house blend)

4. Remember Mike Penner, the Los Angeles Times sportswriter who took time off in April 2007 and came back to work as a woman? He’s over it and wants to be a dude again: A Transitional Dilemma. (@edge boston)

5. A preview for last week’s L Word retrospective is now up at Showtime’s website:

From Intern Vashti:

6. Interview with RuPaul about her comeback, being Alex’s number one feeling, and other stuff. (@the daily beast)

7. That Time Magazine article about getting rid of marriage altogether, as proposed by two professors from Pepperdine. You know, that school where a prominent staff member heavily supported Prop 8 and was in a commercial for it.

team-picks-new

robin-iconfrom Robin:
Looking for a fun arty blog to follow? If you like awesomely drawn stuff, check out my illustrator friend Arianna Stolt.. Arianna is funny and quirky and rad. She also posts about other artists quite a bit so I love being able to link off of her site to find other interesting and creative artists.

carly-icon2from Carly:
Really insightful article over at Jezebel about how the Prop 8 supporters might have accidentally helped to eliminate the use of the term “marriage” in a legal context. This is extremely fascinating to me, and the ideas put forth herein are actually very similar to some that Robin and I were discussing not too long ago. Civil unions, recognized under law, should be the norm for everyone; what you choose to do with it (wedding, commitment ceremony, Vegas vacation) should be up to you, your family, and your religious convictions.

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Riese

Riese is the 41-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3164 articles for us.

9 Comments

    • Yeah I guess they got a lot of crap about it and so eharmony was forced to release a statement. In their defense it is true that I imagine it’s much harder to set up a network without binary gender preferences, just in terms of like, the technical aspects of it. I mean that’s what they said was the reason. Anyhow obvs Portia & ellen have changed the world and probs the Baptist church will let gays back in too I think.

  1. We had to fight prop 8 and we need to fight all these initiatives as they pop up around the country but I know very few people who truly believe that the marriage fight is the one we should be having right now. Most people just want equal protection under the law – call it whatever you want. I totally agree with you about the civil union thing.

    • Yeah I like what the Jezebel piece suggests.

      I feel like especially when more and more spouses are going to be needing to go under their partner’s health insurance if they get laid off — I dunno. Just now more than ever, people need their legal rights more than romance or a church ceremony, we all just need to have an equal shot at not going bankrupt. The rest of it is gravy.

  2. The only thing I don’t understand in the Transitional Dilemma article is the sentence “a sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times–you can’t get much more macho than that.” How silly.

  3. I just watch Ellen and think about how much my mom loves/has loved her for so long, and then I think about what my mom said and did when I told her I had a gf last year and I think, “Why was it ok for Ellen??” I think about all the women in Ellen’s audience and at home in the midwest who adore her because she has a GOOD HEART and cares and loves people and is funny and an all-around good person. It bothers me that a lot of them probably voted Yes on Prop 8 (the Californians) when it came down to it. At the polls, they forget about this wonderful woman that happens to be a lesbian and they remember their own fears and chicken out on standing up for Ellen and people like her all over the country.
    I just think of how my mom would have not one bad word to say about her, but she would never agree that the loving and respectful relationship we all saw on TV yesterday was ok. Or mine.

    Debbie Downer=is sorry. I <3 Ellen.

  4. I do believe that little things like the Ellen & Portia marriage will help change the mindset of many people, including those in the Midwest.
    In Spain (where I come from), NOBODY would have thought ten years ago that gay marriage and adoption would be legal today. It was a very conservative/catholic country, coming out from a very repressive dictatorship. But see, in a matter of few years, and probably thank to some luck (having a socialist government -with a closeted lesbian as vice-prime-minister), it has become one of the most advanced countries in the world in LGBT matters.

    I can remember the first time a lesbian couple came up in a soup opera show, around 1996, and how shocked were people -including my grandmoms. Now, my grandmoms are SO used to seeing lesbian/gay couples on television that, while they would not be totally happy of me having a girlfriend, they would not think of it as sin. They could probably relate my story to those of the soup operas, and they would sympathize with it. [I mean, it is also true that I am an adorable granddaughter, and they would not want to miss me for something like this;)]
    So, Leah, I do believe that even if not explicit, this will have a lingering effect on your mom, and people like her.

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