Thomas Beatie

The Tranman, Thomas Beatie, used to be a woman, he appeared in the most recent issue of The Advocate  (a magazine for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender readers). According to a national magazine this Oregon man is five months pregnant!!!

Beatie wrote the article and it included a picture of him while he was 22 weeks pregnant. According to the story, he went through a sex change, but decided only to have chest reconstruction and testosterone therapy.

Beatie kept the reproductive organs he was born with. He then stopped getting the hormone injections, which still gave him the ability to get pregnant.

Now the next question is, who is the Father? Wouldn't that be a nice Maury Povich paternity test show?

According to the Associated Press a sheriff in Kansas City say a man should be charged for allowing his girlfriend, Pam Babcock, to sit on their toilet so long that her body became stuck to the seat

Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple discovered a woman living in the bathroom of a mobile home over 30 days ago

Babcock shared her cluttered mobile home with her boyfriend, Kory McFarren.

Sherriff Whipple had this statement to say about the mobile home, "The smell was overpowering - a terrible smell about the house, obviously coming from where she was at."

McFarren, 36, told police his girlfriend, had a phobia about leaving the bathroom and may not have left the bathroom in two years, although he's unsure how long she was in there.

While Babcock was on the toilet, McFarren reportedly brought her food, water, and clean clothes.

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Good News for unwed couples in Maryland. Senate has already voted to expand medical decision-making powers to partners

According to the Associated Press Unmarried couples, gay and straight, could qualify for property benefits given to married couples under a bill tentatively approved by the Maryland Senate
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The bill allows domestic partners to avoid transfer and recordation taxes when transferring property to their partners or stepchildren. The tax benefit is currently given only to married couples.

Senators signed off on the measure after voting to close debate and prevent any filibuster attempt. The Senate already has voted to expand medical decision-making powers for domestic partners.The measures are before lawmakers amid signals from leaders that gay marriage will not be considered this year.

According to a survey in Rome, Boy Scouts and Girl Guides are open to pre-marital sex, drugs and gay experiences.

The survey covered more than 2,500 Scouts from across Europe, aged between 16 and 22, were questioned.More than 80 per cent of those questioned said they were happy to get drunk and almost half said they would smoke marijuana if offered.

Nine out of 10 Scouts and Guides said they expected to have sex before they got married, and almost half said they would be happy to commit adultery.

"There was an open-mindedness about breaking the rules that is common among young people," said a spokesman for the Institute of the Innocents, a government-backed body which conducts research into children and families, and which compiled the results.

Around half the Scouts and Guides who took part were Italian, but British Scouts also responded.

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By Sr Journalist, Justin Smith

According to the Dallas Observer a Texas preacher has been spanking, beating and raping woman for more than 20's The Dallas Observer spoke with an anonymous woman named Joy. She recalls her story on how she first met the abusive preacher. Joy remembered the way he crept up behind her in her bedroom and touched her on the side, startling her just before he shoved her facedown onto the bed. She also remembered excruciating pain as he jammed a 3-foot club into her rectum and asked repeatedly, "Does it feel good? Does it feel good?" 

Preacher Sherman Allen -  "Spanky"

The reverend was unknown in May 1983, when Joy told Fort Worth police that he beat her with a paddle and raped her anally with a wooden club. Then, she claims, he sodomized her, slapping his hand over her mouth and cursing at her when she tried to cry out to God. 

When he was finished, the woman says, the preacher propped her up in front of a bathroom mirror, pried her eyes open so she was forced to look at herself and called her a bitch, a whore, a prostitute, a cokehead. "God told me to do this to you," she recalled him saying. And there was more. 

He allegedly told her, no one would ever believe her. But if she was stupid enough to tell, he'd come back and do the same thing to her 4-year-old daughter. As she hunched naked on a love seat in her apartment after the attack, numb with pain, hating this God he invoked and hoping she would die, the preacher handed her two rolls of toilet tissue. He kissed her on the forehead and walked out the door. Time to add a name to the face.

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By Sr. Correspondent, Justin Smith

Bareback sex: Wikipedia defines Bareback as a term that originated in gay slang to describe acts of unprotected sex, especially anal sex. The term's usage, however, has crossed-over to more mainstream slang to describe any type of penetrative sexual act without the use of a condom.

According to the BBC three gay pornographic films have been pulled from the shelf because it showed men having sex with each other with no protection (barebacking). The DVD's were pulled after a British show called, "Newsnight", revealed that 4 out of 8 of the young men having unprotected sex in the video were diagnosed as being HIV positive.

One of the featured models or porn stars in the film had said to BBC he was distressed that footage which he believed showed him becoming infected had been put on sale.

In another case, British producer, Rufus Ffoulkes, was imprisoned for child pornography.

The 48 year old put a 16-year-old boy in a gay porn film, in which he had unprotected sex.

The young men for his homemade porn films were from the website Gaydar.

Ffoulkes paid the teenager 500 pounds, which is $992.85 dollars, to take pictures then put him in a bareback porn film.

According to edp24.co.uk, the prosecution's attorney, Miranda Bevan, told the court, "Distasteful though this sort of activity is, the reality is that the gay pornography industry is sizeable and apart from the age of this young man, is legal"

"Unprotected sex is standard in the gay porn industry."

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GBMNews was proud to provide the program at the recent Nubian Dream Lounge event held at the Taj Lounge in New York City.

The theme of the evening was Black History Month. At the event, GBMNews chose to present up and coming artists that have associated themselves with our site. Everyone had a great time.

Here are a few pictures taken of the guests and honorees.

 

By Adriana Garcia,
Editing by Missy Ryan and Eric Walsh

According Reuters Non-Hispanic whites will become a minority in the United States by 2050, with immigrants and their children driving 82 percent of U.S. population growth in coming years, a new study said on Monday.

The U.S. population will grow to 438 million in 2050 from 296 million in 2005 if current population trends continue, the Pew Research Center study found.

Non-Hispanic whites would account for 47 percent of the total in 2050, it concluded.

By that time, one in every five Americans will be a foreign-born immigrant, compared to one in eight in 2005.

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By Tim Johnston

SYDNEY, Australia: Prime Minister Kevin Rudd opened a new chapter in Australia's tortured relations with its indigenous peoples Wednesday with a comprehensive and moving apology for past wrongs and a call for bipartisan action to improve the lives of Australia's Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

"The Parliament is today here assembled to deal with this unfinished business of the nation, to remove a great stain from the nation's soul, and in a true spirit of reconciliation to open a new chapter in the history of this great land, Australia," Rudd told Parliament.

This was "Government business, motion No. 1," the first act of Rudd's Labor government, which was sworn in Tuesday after a convincing electoral win over the 11-year administration of John Howard, who had for years refused to apologize for the misdeeds of past governments.

Rudd's apology was particularly addressed to the so-called Stolen Generations, the tens of thousands of indigenous children who were removed, sometimes forcibly, from their families in a policy of assimilation that only ended in the 1970s.

In some states it was part of a policy to "breed out the color," in the words of Cecil Cook, who held the title of chief protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory in the 1930s.

"We apologize especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country," Rudd said as hundreds of members of the Stolen Generations listened in the gallery, some with tears in their eyes. "For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

"To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry."

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I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Ramone Johnson and speaking with him over the phone conducting a phone interview.

Ramone Johnson is the gay lifestyle columnist for About.com, a New York Times Company, and top 10 Web-based information and resource site. Gay Life on About.com is a practical guide to better gay living.

Ramone Johnson of About.Com

Be it through a solution to the common love and relationship quandary, a step-by-step guide to coming out, or an exploration into gay rights in the most volatile regions of the world, Ramone provides today's same-gender-loving person with the tools they need to live a better gay life.

Mr. Johnson has been a guest gay lifestyle expert on Q Television's "On Q Live", "The Derek and Romaine Show" on Sirius Satellite Radio and New York's Power 105 Morning Show. He's been featured as a panelist in the New York Times "Times Talks" Gay and Lesbian Speaker Series and was recently named one of Clik Magazine's Elite 25.

Ramone is an freelance journalist and advocate for the gay community. He seeks to give back to the gay community by providing advice, facts and resources for all aspects of gay and bisexual life. Ramone resides in New York City.

Mr. Johnson is an engineer by degree, many moons ago Ramone realized that life was more than gears and gadgets and embarked on a queerer mission of gay social advocacy.

Mr. Johnson is very committed to increasing positive awareness of same gender loving people and gay culture. To building self-esteem and self-awareness within the gay community, through practical and objective advice resources and information. He is also committed to helping rid the world of homophobia, discrimination and hate by developing a better understanding, and in turn acceptance, of gay people.

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Mr. Alexander Robinson is as of right now is one of our (LGBT) black leaders. I had been trying to get an interview with Robinson for a while. But when you are one of the most important leaders in the LGBT Civil Rights movement it's hard to find an opening in open schedule. I walked into his office and was greeted with a smile. This attractive, sophisticated and magnanimous man quickly shook my hand and let me sit down. I was in awww of his office. I noticed a beautiful picture of him with Senator Hillary Clinton and numerous awards that he earned for fighting for LGBT rights.

I was quickly shown around the office and noticed everyone hard at work. I came back to his office and started my interview with him. Robinson answered all my questions with ease and poise, like he had written them himself. To his flawless hair down to his spit shined shoes this man has it all. A capable and competent staff, a loving partner, and being well traveled who could ask for anything more.

We ended the interview and I went on my way feeling that I was in the presence of a sovereign. I observed Robinson after the interview had officially ended and he was hard at work like nothing had happened. He and his staff are a reminder that Black Gay people have the same responsibility to fight for Gay Civil Rights just as much as our white counterparts.

Interview with H. Alexander Robinson

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John Gibson issues a TV apology following distasteful comments about actors death...

By Diana Barbarich

Fox News presenter John Gibson has issued an apology after mocking Heath Ledger’s death on air just hours after his shock passing.

The radio jock caused a stir on Tuesday when he played an audio clip from Ledger’s hit flick, Brokeback Mountain, in which Jake Gyllenhaal's character says to Ledger's, "I wish I knew how to quit you."

Gibson then told his listeners, "Well, he found out how to quit you."

Later in the broadcast, Gibson shocked listeners by playing another Brokeback Mountain clip, this time of Ledger's character saying, "We're dead."

The host then distastefully repeated, "We're dead," before playing the clip again.

Gibson also called the 28-year-old star a “weirdo" with a "serious drug problem" – later on going on to suggest that Ledger took his own life because "a serious position in the [stock] market" or because he "watched the Clinton-Obama debate last night."

Rashad Robinson, a spokesman for The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation quickly hit back at Gibson's comments, calling them "vulgar and disgusting," adding that "it's sickening that Gibson would exploit Heath Ledger's tragic death to promote such hurtful intolerance.

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By Gray Phombeah

They pray as they face Mount Kenya, which they believe to be the home of their God, known as Ngai.

And their name means "a united people".

But Kenya's Mungiki followers are no ordinary believers.

Their holy communion is tobacco-sniffing, their hairstyle that of the Mau Mau dreadlocks and the origin of the sect is still shrouded in mystery.

Since the late 1990s, the sect has left behind a trail of blood in its rejection of the trappings of Western culture.

Deaths

Many deaths are blamed on the Mungiki

Last week, the sect was back in the news following two days of clashes with police which left at least two policemen dead in Nairobi and 70 of its members in police custody.

Many deaths are blamed on the Mungiki The clashes were sparked by a dispute over the control of the private minibuses business in some parts of Nairobi, two weeks after 30 people were killed in similar clashes in the Rift Valley province.

Police say more than 50 people died last year in clashes involving the sect and owners of private minibuses, known as Matatu, in Nairobi alone.

"Mungiki is a politically motivated wing of a religious organisation," says Ken Ouko, a lecturer of sociology at the University of Nairobi.

"The religious bit is just a camouflage. It's more like an army unit. During the old system, they seemed to be complimentary to the system. In the new government, they seem to be antagonistic."

Pressing for support on marriage issue

By John C. Drake

As a plaintiff, he won over the state's highest court. an advocate, he helped persuade the Legislature.

MassEquality's David Wilson (left) and his husband, Robert Compton. photo: David Kauffman

Now, as chairman of the state's leading gay rights organization, David Wilson says he is determined to make the case to his own community.

MassEquality, a gay marriage advocacy coalition, has launched a statewide push to increase support for its cause among black residents of Massachusetts. The effort is a priority for Wilson, an African-American who was named the group's chairman in October.

He knows it will be a challenge.

Many black people in Massachusetts and across the country have reacted unsympathetically to the gay rights movement, especially to efforts by gay rights advocates to link the fight for marriage rights to the civil rights movement.

Gay rights advocates say with the battle against a constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriage in the state now behind them, they are beginning a concerted effort to speak directly to the black community, hoping the approach can change some minds in the Bay State and serve as a national model for outreach to minorities.

"We have defeated the amendment, and clearly we need to educate the broader community about equal marriage," Wilson said. "We have a lot of work to do, because this is just a step forward in this equal-marriage fight across the country. If we get it right here in Massachusetts, we can expect to use this model elsewhere."

As Kenya simmers, a vicious slum war is playing out between 'Taliban' vigilantes and a mysterious sect reputed to drink blood.

By Andrew Ehrenkranz and Scott Johnson

Last July, Washington made some brief, if mostly unexamined, news in East Africa when it announced a $15 million grant to the Kenyan government to help with "law and order" issues. The funding came a full six months before last December's disputed Kenyan election and the subsequent wave of violence that is now flowing, amoebalike, across the country. For outside observers the cash injection may have seemed odd, given Kenya's positive political and economic track record.

But the African nation's nicely lettered signposts of progress and development masked a jarring problem. Throughout much of last spring, in part because of the run-up to the elections but also for a host of other reasons, huge swaths of Kenya were succumbing to a particularly undulant, brutal kind of gangsterism. In episode after episode, many of which were documented by Kenyan reporters, innocent people were beheaded, skinned, raped, murdered and tortured by members of a secretive outlawed sect called Mungiki. In response the Kenyan police and domestic security services began to jail thousands of young men. Human rights organizations began calling attention to the apparent "disappearances" of several of them. The "Mungiki threat" became a national, if not an international, obsession.

Kenyan fears were not misplaced. The dynamics of the Mungiki sect were as compelling as they were appalling. Mungiki had deep and growing political influence. Its 1.5 million members were drawn from Kenya's largest and most powerful tribe, the Kikuyu, who controlled much of Kenya's economy. The sect was said to have as much pull with the police as it did with senior ministers. And yet for all the suspicion, the government, led by Kikuyu President Mwai Kibaki, appeared to be fighting back against the destructive creep of criminal violence by stepping up police raids in cities like Nairobi, a Mungiki stronghold and long the center of a major crime problem.

By Yuval Yoaz

Isaac Herzog

Welfare Minister Isaac Herzog wants to initiate a revolution for single-sex couples when it comes to adoption: According to the new policy Herzog has decided to promote, homosexual and lesbian couples will be able to legally adopt third-party children - meaning those children who are not the biological offspring of either of the couple's members. This constitutes a breakthrough in the legal attitude toward the desire of same-sex couples to adopt. Until now, the legal precedent related only to situations in which one partner wanted to adopt the biological child of his/her partner, and to the Population Registry recognizing such an adoption carried out abroad.

In recent months, four requests have been sent to the Social Affairs Ministry by same-sex couples who want the Children's Welfare Service to find a child they can adopt. In addition, the same-sex couples have asked to be put on the list for adoption through government institutions. Following internal discussion in the ministry about the matter's legal aspects, opinions have been prepared both by the Social Affairs Ministry's legal adviser, attorney Batya Artman, and by the Justice Ministry. Last week, these legal opinions were sent to Attorney General Menachem Mazuz; they are currently awaiting his decision. Although the Justice Ministry does not consider the attention generated by the subject as a basic solution to the overall issue - it considers it as a specific solution to the couples in question - Herzog plans to treat these cases as precedents that will dictate the future work procedures for adoption by homosexuals and lesbians.

BFLAG announces that it is hosting it's annual convention in Lousiville, Ky. July 4-12th 2008.

The organtization is a chartered affiliate of The American Council of the Blind and is the only national organization dedicated to serving the special needs of individuals who are both, visually impaired and lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

The BFLAG annual convention coincides with the convention of the American Council of the Blind.

The convention will offer educational seminars and support group as well as a banquet and other social events both at the hotel and in other local venues.

Sponsors and volunteers are needed for all events throughout the convention.

For more information, contact:

Mark Hanohano
BFLAG Convention Coordinator
Los Angeles, California
(323) 533-4395

Hugh Arnold BFLAG President
Baltimore, Maryland
(410) 254-1972

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A draft bill before the Iraqi parliament would grant an amnesty for as many as 5,000 prisoners, yet excludes those convicted of homosexual "crimes."

Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the country's government, said the bill had been sent to the parliament's Speaker yesterday.

Iraqis being held by the Americans are also excluded, alongside those charged with terrorist offences, rape and adultery.

While homosexuality is in itself not illegal in Iraq, several laws are used to persecute gay people.

Laws against loitering, indecent exposure, spreading "dangerous diseases," committing and indecent act in public and making "indecent" advances are all used.

However, of much more pressing threat to gay Iraqis is the actions of militia groups.

By John Tagliabue

French rapper named Rost is of Togolese origin

PARIS: The French news media were captivated by Hurricane Katrina, pointing out how the American government's faltering response brought into plain view the sad lot of black Americans. But this time the French, who have long criticized America's racism, could not overlook the parallels at home.

"It is true that the devastations of Katrina have cruelly shed light on the wounds of America, ghettoization, poverty, criminality, racial and territorial tensions," Le Figaro, the conservative daily, said in an editorial on Sept. 8. "In France, those in disagreement ran to pelt the 'American model' and the neoconservative president.

"But have they only looked at the state of their own country?"

Since April, 48 people, most of them children and all of them black, have died in fires in Paris.

In neighborhoods like Château Rouge, filled with the hundreds of thousands of nonwhite immigrants, some Arabs but mainly blacks, whom France has absorbed over the years from former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, you feel the anger.

"It could be a coincidence," said Sissouo Cheickh, bitterly, "but one question the French have to answer is: Of 48 people who died, why were 48 black?"

Cheickh, 28, got a university degree in France, but rather than working for someone else and running into what he and other young blacks say is France's low glass ceiling, he decided to start his own business. Six months ago he scraped together some money and opened a store.

"You see these fabrics? All from Africa, from my family," said Cheickh, who came from Mali, as he gestured toward colorful rolls of cloth.

African-American Struggle For Racial Equality Is Being Replicated In Officially "Color-Blind" France

by Susan Sachs

Patrick Lozès has a dream: One day France's black citizens will enjoy the equality granted them under law.

"To be black and proud — that's not being anti-French," says Mr. Lozès, whose vision challenges France's color-blind model of assimilation. "It's simply the liberation of a people who don't see themselves reflected in their country's public life — in its theater, television, medicine, and universities — except in negative images."

It is not an accident that Mr. Lozès' words often contain echoes of Martin Luther King Jr. and other luminaries of the American civil rights movement. The African-American struggle for racial equality has been his prototype for France's first national black lobbying organization.

His group, called the Representative Council of Black Organizations (Le Conseil Représentative des Associations Noires, or CRAN), was founded in late 2005, just after widespread rioting in the suburban ghettos populated largely by the families of African and Arab immigrants.