In the Life: Ep. 1411, "Survival of the Fittest"

on this edition of In The Life survival of the fittest looking at the big pars are snuggly bold meant to be interpreted every generation so we're the new generation and threatening this moral Decay weakens our resistance all this and Harvey on this month's in the Life who needs them in the life is funded in part by the H vanan amaran Foundation additional support provided by the Ford Foundation the Overbrook foundation and the annual support of in the Life members like you [Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to in the life I'm Billy Porter tonight we'll look at part of what makes gays and lesbians Dynamic the ability to find truth in who we are despite the barrage of messages that devalue our experience es it is in this strength that we find the essence of our community so without further Ado in the Life go searching for survival of the fittest in National Treasures gay and lesbian Americans are as every bit as patriotic as heterosexual Americans and want to and are willing to serve their country Gruff Beauty for a while I went around telling people I was a moose um just for the hell of it and Powerful tradition I'm not just trying to open up Judaism to make room for me as a lesbian I'm trying to change Judaism itself as we saw in the 1950s when Joseph McCarthy equated homosexuality with the Communist Menace and today under don't ask don't tell the LGBT community has long been the brunt of alarmist calls for protecting the nation in level pink in the life looks at how homophobia undermines National Security and threatens that which is truly American there's a sad theme in American history of conflating National Security enemies with uh sexual [Music] deviant they constantly portray abnormal sexual behavior as being normal this moral Decay weakens our resistance to the onslaught of the Communist masters of deceased in World War II gays and lesbians were fired because they were imagined to be mentally ill then in the McCarthy era gays and lesbians were fired because they were imagined to pose a security risk then in the 60s the proponents of discrimination said gays and lesbians were more prone to alcoholism now the military says that gays and lesbians pose a threat to unit cohesion and that rationale just like the other rationals is not based on evidence the reason the military keeps coming up with different rationals is because they can't ad the real rationale for the policy is homophobia it was assumed that you can't have homosexuals it would degrade military Readiness and compromise the privacy of straight members the law was written that prohibited uh somebody from admitting that their Gau so that the people who hate them so much won't be upset retired rear Admiral Allan Steinman is the highest ranking military person to come out to date for those um you know 25 years or so I was on active duty I couldn't share my life with a loved one I couldn't have a family I couldn't do all those things that uh heterosexual Americans take for granted I had to basically stay in the closet I actually went back in the closet to go into the military I understood don't ask don't tell to to mean that literally they can't ask you you don't tell and you're fine um it's obviously wrong in the last two years uh The Washington Post just reported that the military has fired 37 translators many of those translators were Arabic farsy and Korean speakers those are the three languages identified as the axess of Evil by the Bush Administration I was studying Korean I was studying Arabic Alistair did a lot better in class than I did but I was still in the in the top 15% of my class he was about to leave to go to his next training station we just kind of thought well you know we just have this big inspection there's not going to be any threat of anybody going through our rooms tonight you know why don't we just spend the night together that night they went through it's called a uh it's Barracks check so as a result I got a full room inspection which turned up a number of personal photographs that we had all of the straight couples um who were caught and the gay couples who didn't have photographs they were given the 14 days restriction 14 days extra Duty as were we but we also had an open investigation and as we launched into the war on terror these two highly skilled translators joined the more than 110,000 gay and Les Ian soldiers discharged from the US Armed Forces since World War II one can theorize that how nice it would have been to have some more Arabic translators out there on the front line so we could communicate with the Iraqi people and perhaps uh stop some of the misunderstanding that resulted in some of the violence and deaths this is a policy that is not based on evidence this is a policy that undermines National Security that wastes money that leads us to fire badly needed Arabic language translators in the middle of a war war on terrorism I I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle the ACLU people for the American way all of them who tried to secularize America I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen what he was trying to do was to start another sex Panic where people would again confuse the national security threat um coming from outside the country with gays and lesbians inside the country but Panic is not limited to sexuality a 2003 Department of Homeland Security press release alerted law enforcement that males dressing as females were potential terrorist suspects National Security is an issue after 911 it is important to put in laws which protect the US population however you know those laws have to work detention is a good example that how these policies really failed 1600 plus people who were detained and none of them actually were found to be a terrorist the conditions of LGBT people in detention centers is horrifying a gay man from Indonesia uh in a Detention Center was harassed by detention guards they called him names they asked him to perform oral sex on him and he and he was actually raped by another inmate I would say the Patriot Act is a big red flag but I understand where it comes from and I understand where don't ask don't tell comes from that doesn't make him right I think it's really real easy for the government to gently push a mentality of intolerance to any and everyone that they're afraid of unless we have the intelligence to recognize the traes and then if I may use a word which we use in Wisconsin unless we have the guts to name them we should be taken down from those watchtowers and should not be representing the American people the fact that gay generals and Admirals are willing to come out of the closet tells the American public that gays and lesbians can serve honorably can serve loyally and can do so without undermining National Security gay and lesbian Americans are as every bit as patriotic as uh heterosexual Americans and want to and are willing to serve their country the law of course prevents us from doing so people who oppose gays and lesbians in the military don't oppose lifting the band because they're worried about unit cohesion they oppos lifting the band because they know that once gays and lesbians are allowed to serve openly in the military that will open the door to a range of other gay rights the late bad Rustin fought passionately to give a voice to the African-American civil rights movement he wrote the first Civil Rights Act organized the March on Washington and was integral in bringing nonviolence to the movement the same movement that forced him out because his gayness was a political liability I'm Andre d Shields and you're watching in the Life throughout history our concepts of what a beautiful body looks like have dramatically changed because these glamorized Concepts often don't reflect the body types found in the majority many folks feel left out in the 1980s one group of gay men decided that it was their time to be celebrated and since then Bears around the globe have found themselves a part of this rapid growing niche market tonight and bear to be beautiful and the life says wolf in San Francisco in the mid 80s after the epidemic hit these guys were kind of responding or reacting to a number of things gaining some extra weight not being you know totally Jim toned became eroticized as healthy there was also a very different kind of phenomenon where men were looking for ways to reconnect all of our friends had died or moved out of town and said you know we've got to start going out and I walked into the Lone Star and it it it was a Eureka moment I there were guys that had beards and were were Bears looked like me the physically they didn't fit them all that they did tend to you know be singled out or feel separated out because of their their physical appearance yeah I think the whole bear movement started you know because there because we needed an alternative to what we were seeing in the magazines and everything everyone is not like that and you know everyone has their certain definition of of what they think is beautiful if you're wise exercise all the fat off take it off off here off there when you're seen anywhere with your hat wear a Mel wave in your hair keep you young and beautiful it's your duty to be beautiful that's right girls keep young and beautiful if you want to be being a bear is about you know being inclusive so we trying to bring as many people from The Fringe as possible if you don't feel like you belong to the Chelsea muscle crowd you don't belong to any of these other like predefined areas in V Community you belong to the Bears though I love bears the whole Community it's comfortable so there's this whole kind of philosophy of bears are about not having attitude bears are just kind of laidback easy going well yeah I you know bears are snuggly and not afraid to be affectionate bears like to have fun the reason the club exists is in order to create as many of these opportunities as possible for Bears to get together and congregate we love love love to have Parts raise your hand if you want to play it's a fun social event it's different it's different than the bars my hair and the purpose of the game is to get from one end to the other while being blindfolded by correctly answering multiple guest questions a play Party B non- denominal worship service C deing some Goble D big whoopy bear in room 832 see [Music] we call them the get to know your neigh bear games you know it seems no pun is too painful there's a dizzying amount of be related puns that I've encountered and used Through The Years one cannot have a cultural Identity or Community identity without having one's own lingo and there is a very elaborate bare bare language or be sling husbear is like husband I my my hus Bears back there looking back there somewhere yeah hus Bears has been a very popular term in my respon goes but my partner he really loves the term woof like wolf or woof like that means you think someone's hot never underestimate the power of one group to then subdivide itself there there's and so in the bear Community there any number of terms bear otter Cub wolf I've even heard and everybody has their own definition of them bears are all about having you know hairy chest some big beards and a big belly and just being big guys Cub generally is often thought of as a younger bear some people are no I'm not a bear I'm an otter which means you're a slender physically slender bear I guess wolf I hear and I still haven't figured that one out for a while I went around telling people I was a moose um just for the hell of it but then of course there's some people who take it very seriously and then you get this endless tension between is this person a beer with a small be or or a capital B where somebody else is you know you know girlfriend get over it it's just it's a joke we'll get people all sides of the [Music] shapes they like to do everything from lift weights to have potlock dinner parties you know within within the first four years of this there were there were self-organizing bear clubs all over the country the bear phenomenon went Global in a half a dozen years well people come from Australia Switzerland Japan kind of parallel to the Circuit party scene is a kind of a bear circuit as well that people travel from place to place and and Country to Country these are large Gatherings of bears in in the hundreds of thousands as you find up to a thousand people potentially [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] attendees in our consumer culture that you are a community you are an identity when you are a niche market so there was this kind of race to sell product to bears look for the bare necessities the simple Bare Necessities forget about your worries and your me and I've noticed it's cropping up more and more uh in mass media hey whan who's the bear oh is that the Mr Burns you're always talking about no he's nobody shut up Stewart nice to meet you steuart the media tells us this is what a man is supposed to be and these are the people who get rewarded in our society uh what is all of that about there are some people that they need a little bit of extra help sometimes in finding themselves and becoming part of the community the the thing about the bare movement it's allowed a lot of people who have been disenfranchised from the general mainstream gay population to realize that they're acceptable and accepted and that's a pretty great thing back left arm yellow [Music] despite the common misconception that religion and homosexuality don't mix many LGBT People Credit their faith for their survival for two women Judaism has provided a Haven and a vehicle for change the phrase tun Alam is usually translated as repairing the world and as you'll see that's exactly what rabbis Sharon Klein Bal and Don Rose are trying to do I had my bot Mitzvah in a conservative Jewish synagogue at a time then girls didn't have B Mitzvah in synagogues like boys had Bar Mitzvah of course women have always played significant roles in Judaism but not as official spiritual leaders with the title of Rabbi Rabbi Sharon Klein bomb is the senior Rabbi at congregation bet simat Tor or cbst founded years ago cbst is the world's largest LGBT synagogue with over 800 members I was just looking for a place to belong as a Jew I was near Beth hun Street and I decided to go in and dig up the rabbi I didn't have to dig her up she was sitting there working I never met a female Rabbi before uh Jerry fair is a member of our congregation and we think she is the oldest living Jewish lesbian it's a you are a prophet she first called cbst several years ago because she was planning her funeral and she very much wanted to be buried by lesbian Rabbi many years ago a lesbian woman in the group that I was traveling around with died of cancer and at her funeral the women formed a circle and each one threw on a handful of dirt that was religion to me then I said you're a lesbian Jerry what do you want but until very recently that would not have been an option when I entered rabinal School in 1985 uh there was only one out lesbian Rabbi that existed anywhere in the Jewish World there were other LGBT Jews of course but for these rabinal students the climate of the80s forced them to keep their gay and Jewish identities separate the second year in rabinal school a secret meeting was called we were told the name of the city to fly to we were given a phone number to call from the airport when we arrived and then we were told where to find the conference this was the first conference for for Gay and Lesbian Jewish professionals people came from all over to be in an environment where it was possible to be both gay and Jewish and it was an outrage here were people who were spiritual leaders helping people live whole and complete lives and yet they themselves had to absolutely deny a significant part of their souls Rabbi Don Rose who faced expulsion from school shares a similar experience I initially went to the Jewish Theological Seminary which is conservative my first day of school I looked across the class and saw a young woman with with spiky white hair and I went oh my I'm in love and oh my God I'm in the wrong school I was called to the Dean's office and asked if I was in violation of the rules against being a homosexual he told me that if I kept my head down and my mouth shut that's a direct quote maybe I would get through but I would never know until I was actually ordained it's very difficult to be able to be a full religious leader when you have to keep such a significant part of your own Humanity uh silenced or absent much of the textual debate over homosexuality focuses on two controversial verses in Leviticus those two verses condemn men uh a man who sleeps with a man uh like he would with a woman it's considered an Abomination and that person should be put to death these two verses have become used uh by religious Traditions as the source of anti-gay bigotry and discrimination but Melanie Henderson former board member of bet Kim kashim or BCC points out the necessity of interpretation all of the stuff that's written in the Torah all the stuff that's written in the ancient writings all the stuff that's in the talmud it's in Aramaic it's in Hebrew and it is required that it be interpreted there's all these rabbis they take on a a topic from the Torah and they argue about it and nothing is set in stone it's meant to be interpreted every generation so we are we're the new generation this text right here that I have on my desk right now which is the uh this itself is the Bible with the with all of the interpretation surrounding it the biblical texts are to for you know five or six lines on this page every other word on this page is an interpretation I find otherwise reasonable people and understanding the Bible as a living breathing document to become Bible thumping fundamentalists when it comes to those two sentences in Leviticus only a few verses later it says rebellious children should be stoned to death I don't know so many people who are advocating that as a response to teenage rebellion um there's a there's a little teeny phrase in Leviticus that is uh and it means live by them meaning live by the laws and so you're not supposed to die by them you're not supposed to suffer a little death every day because you have to separate yourself from the person you love if it's the same sex sexuality is a deep part of our souls and we can't simply say okay just stop being gay and you'll still be a whole person theoretically the reform movement presents an inclusive at ude towards LGBT congregants and ordained LGBT rabbis however the reality in predominantly straight congregations is far more complicated I now am assistant Rabbi at a big reform temple in New Jersey I absolutely love the job and love the people and they're struggling with the issue of my lesbianism I have to have my Judaism be largely separate from my family because they're not fully accepted there the spouse of the rabbi or any other clergy is recognized during High holidays and I asked for that for uh my lover and um and it was denight the impact of rabbis like Sharon and Dawn reaches far beyond the LGBT community I'm not just trying to get a little piece of the pie I'm not just trying to open up Judaism to make room for me as a lesbian I'm trying to change Judaism itself I'm trying to change the nature of religion in America I'm trying to change the way we talk about God and think about Theology and a part of that is absolutely because I'm a lesbian I found in Judaism this a religion that spoke to me as an already marginalized person that spoke to me about um being able to turn my marginality and what was hard about my life into something that was POS positive and a celebration I think the queer sensibility is what is going to help save Contemporary American religion in particular Judaism that people who are so-called The Outsiders are really full of the deepest truths that Society is desperately in need of and um I think this is a great gift that we have to offer Rabbi kimb bomb and Rabbi Rose remain in their respective positions and active in the fight against homophobia as I moved forward in my writing life I also moved forward in my personal life and I felt the need to tell stories that mattered more and more to me one of the things that I found in coming out and I did did so late in life is the realization of how much Of My Life I Lived or how much I lived from Fear and that in coming out the fear was gone I don't have to be afraid in terms of what I put out there in the paper because I'm no longer afraid if someone says what does that mean say well I'll tell you what it means and that's cool words have extraordinary power when skillfully woven words can challenge us move us and for one woman Define a revolution Lisa Moore has dedicated herself to giving life to the words that have largely been absent in our history the stories of lesbians of color in this next segment more recounts her journey in becoming a one-woman press I would call my Approach Grassroots I would also call my Approach DIY do it yourself DC based Lisa Moore Helm's Redbone press one of the only black lesbian publishing houses around Lisa's passion is connect ing people with information so when she recognized The Limited number of books available to young black lesbians Redbone press was born it was like 1995 that a friend of my younger sister she had come out to herself but she didn't know anybody else so she came and she's seeing all the books on my bookshelf and she says do you have anything about black lesbians and I thought well I've got hom girls she said I've seen that and then I'm looking and I'm thinking okay there's got to be a book of like coming out stories for black Les Les but I discovered that there was none so I kind of put it in my head that well I could I could at least put them together and chop it around and what ended up happening was that I published the book myself 1997 yielded red Bone's first effort the Anthology does your mama know was a two-time lamb the literary Award winner there are 49 stories by 41 writers and they basically are poems letters essays and they are the stories of people coming out to neighbors mothers friends sisters lovers and you know people being okay with that the title does your mama know it's very gerine to what the book is about I mean if your mama knows everything's okay I had women who were grandmothers that said where was this book when I was coming out you know I got married had kids divorce my husband I've got grandkids and I wish that this book was there I've had women come up to me in the past last year and say I love your book I just got it last week you know it helped me come out to my mom you know and I'm just happy to have been able to help facilitate that and bull Jean love her go get she a after unveiling the coming out stories of Mama redbones Focus shifted to the bull Jean stories an out and proud Southern celebration from Sharon bridgeforth put sweet out myself sweet ain't got me nothing but left the bull jeene stories was about the character bulldog do Jean and her life and loves but within the stories she's very ins sconed in her community she's not ostracized at all she's walking down the street they say hey how you doing you know everybody knows who she is and she knows who they are it's not like she lives on the edge of town you know and nobody talks about her people whisper about her it's not that at all in her ongoing Reclamation of History MO is venturing into new personal territory the documentary film it's called sassy be gone searching for black lesbian Elders I don't want you to think there was no homophobia that it was easy being you know no and as I say in the church there you could know you know choir director or the musician or the organ player or whatever whatever was a gay guy but where were the lesbians my mother would be saying things like don't you be making fun of her and I'd be thinking making fun of her Lord if you only knew what was going through my head I want to run out there and hold a hand and walk up the street with her I was interviewed doing older black lesbians in their 60s 7s and ' 80s and asking them about what being a black lesbian was like during segregation and after segregation it wasn't our time to be outspoken but it's your time to be outspoken so do it you know we did what we could when we was coming up we got away with uh as much as we could we would be scared to walk down the street holding hand but you know I see it all the time people really really respond to it especially young people because they want to know what it's going to be like being old they don't know that there's people that have lived through some things that they could tell them about inundated with questions from fellow writers looking to publish Moore and her colleagues organized fire and ink a writers conference that aims to provide support to LGBT writers of color we had people that wanted to publish we had self-publishers there we had performance artists there we had poets there we had playwrights there we had screenwriters there and they all came together to talk about writing talk about getting your work out there talk about the actual writing process as well as the business of it talk about how to network talk about how to get our work into Academia because getting work into Academia ensures it's longevity people came out of workshops crying because they had to write things and they had never been and such an affirming place before where they could be all of themselves and be black and gay and lesbian or trans or by you know and write about what they wanted to write about and have people support that and recently Redbone faced perhaps its biggest challenge spirited a collection of essays on religion and spirituality we met with more as she wrapped up editing the Anthology and there's so many black gang lesbian people that go to church week after week and have it pounded into their head that the Bible hates this the Bible says the Bible says if you come out as a gay or lesbian person in a black community you risk being ostracized from that community and if Community is what gives you strength and you risk being shut out a lot of gang lesbian people will just not come out and it's just kind of blowing my mind in the past few days of editing this book that oh my God know I am a one woman in a one-bedroom apartment taking on the black church I think that the work that I do connects people with information that is so necessary it's necessary for people's survival if you will for them to know that it's okay to be all of who they are since this interview Lisa Moore and Redbone press have published five books additionally fire and ink continues to provide a place for black gay writers to embrace all of who they are in 1981 3 years before she retired from professional tennis Billy Jean King's coming out cost her more than .5 million in endorsements in 1999 Rising tennis star amily mesmo of France came out of the closet to the international press upon defeating number one ranked Lindsay Davenport at the Australian Open she experienced neither public Fallout nor any loss of endorsements from our sponsors as Bob Dylan said The Times They Are are changing I'm alen and you're watching in the Life in 1994 Keith Lewis president of the LA based modeling firm the Morgan agency received a request a client was looking for an HIV positive model to appear in an ad for Eda a supplemental drug developed specifically for those with HIV Lewis held a casting call to find any models willing to go public with their HIV status those who answered the call surprised Lewis in number and as you see here in body positive rais the question what does the face of AIDS look like we thought we'd have you know a few people uh we had close to 100 they helped us understand what this disease was and how the face of the disease had changed out of that first casting call Lewis found Chris craze and the first ad with an openly HIV positive model hit the news stands there was criticism that there was an ad that was out there and there was a hunky guy in this ad that obviously was not HIV positive Chris was hurt and he was shocked he penned this letter uh to a newspaper in San Francisco explaining that he was indeed HIV positive and this was something that he would use the national debate over a healthy-looking model like craze representing the HIV Community inspired Lewis to start a new division called proof positive Juliet Bruce Beverly Dion and Jason are a part of that Division I think it's important for people to see my face in an ad for for for an HIV medication because they can they can put a face to somebody that uses the medication and they can also understand that you can leave lead a normal life the biggest thing now is so many people are ashamed of it and you know I'm not ashamed of it around that time I was about the only woman African-American woman heterosexual woman that was willing to stand up and say that I was an HIV infected woman still from the very beginning this sort of AIDS drug advertising has drawn harsh criticism Mark Milano is an AIDS educator and member of act up I think frankly these are advertising people who know that if you want to Market a product you put a cute attractive person in the ad and that's how you Market your product and that it's giving uh particularly young gay men the impression that aids is over that it's controllable and that it's not that scary to get HIV the power of advertising to create imagery around any kind of product any kind of population is very strong Howard Buford is the founder and CEO of prime access a marketing and advertising firm that targets marginalized populations many people have forgotten just how absolutely devastating AIDS was in the very beginning and of course it still is but not to the mortality rate that we were seeing then you know early on you know one of the first images put out by beniton it was a very sick almost Christlike figure of suffering a lot of people hated that ad and thought it was very exploitative Anne Northrup is a member of the New York City chapter of act at that point in the epidemic we needed to see the reality of people dying human beings putting face on it in 1997 the FDA began to allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to Consumers this decision roughly coincided with the marketing of protas Inhibitors a new class of drugs the fda's decision set off a flood of advertising and the new ads rais New questions this crixivan ad was one of the earliest and most controversial it really gave the impression that having HIV was just about taking some pills and then you would look fabulous and be fabulous presenting these drugs as simple easy to take side effect free medications uh is very misleading Jason jzos appeared in the crixivan ad I was taking crixivan at the time so you know I am an outdoors person there was nothing untrue about that particular ad when someone looks at the ads and says that these individuals are too glossy they're too healthy looking I almost become angry because the people that we work with in this division are HIV positive they are indeed part of this disease I think these campaigns are not inappropriate in showing people that there is hope now at the same time a lot of it is unrealistic for people who are living with HIV it it hurts it hurts to look at somebody who is suffering and so to have an advertisement that shows suffering and shows pain it's like what's the message there another ad campaign that Drew criticism was this life goes on campaign for stiva proof positive models Dion and Bruce both appeared in Those ads the FDA pinpointed that ad saying that we the models looked too healthy okay that's almost like saying that somebody might look too uh White to be Latino so what is it what AM how am I supposed to look I mean we work hard those of us some of us who are HIV infected we work very hard to be healthy and to look good and to keep ourselves together I mean sometimes it's not like that sometimes we do get sick but those of us who manage to stay healthy has been through medication or not to take medication some of us are just naturally healthy but beyond the Aesthetics of the ads more far far-reaching questions are being asked about this kind of direct consumer advertising and its effect on the accessibility and cost of these drugs the drug companies are very willing to do all this advertising but less willing to really make the drugs accessible to everyone who needs them uh we are seeing this currently in international issues around the world where millions and millions of people are dying for lack of access to these drugs but even in this country it's been a terrible problem with people unable to afford the drugs and with government programs designed to help running out of money to this day the companies are spending far more money on marketing than they do on Research they claim they have to charge these really high prices for these drugs because they need the money for more research but much more of the money is going into marketing so we really question if it's wise to spend all this money on these ads and they also raise the price of the drugs the expense of the advertising for uh HIV medications I believe in my experience has very little to do with the cost of the medications there's been almost no HIV advertising in the television Arena the production budgets there are much higher than they are for print so uh if you look at HIV advertising has been unusually unusually efficient as far as the costs of the advertising itself pharmaceutical companies also have the highest profit margin of any any industry in the world advertising is certainly a significant expense and a significant part of their cost uh but just the profit margins they take is an unconscionable part of their uh cost we think a decision to use a drug it is a decision between a patient and the doctor they need to look at the drugs to look at the data to make a decision what drug is appropriate uh and to take that drug we say cut the advertising cut the price of the drugs you know people can make these decisions for themselves without ads we have had reports from people who in focus groups say I didn't have a doctor they typically go to the emergency room for their medical care where they have actually torn the advertising out of a magazine shown up at the at the emergency room and said can this help me people still don't know enough about how treatment works and this is a downside of the advertising because all it says essentially is take drugs if you have HIV take drugs when in fact what we have said as activists for 15 years now is uh delay treatment wait wait until you really need it because the drugs can have bad side effects can hurt you we still don't know enough about them we still don't have uh the right perfect drugs so you need to use them sparingly and as little as possible rather than as much as possible possible ironically it's the revenue generated by these ads that promotes access to information on a broader scale many Publications rely on these ads uh for their uh funding and that includes pause HIV plus uh a&u so I think actually many of those companies might fold if if the drug company ads dried up I think that advertising is one way of getting word out to a lot of people it should not be the only uh Channel well maybe the interesting thing about having an industry of AIDS ads is that there is a market you know there wouldn't be Those ads if they didn't think they could make money so in some ways that's a good thing because the minute the possibility of a market disappears so will the research according to Keith Lewis the Morgan agency continues to expand with many of the models featured in this segment still actively working sadly Bruce warley passed away a grim reminder that despite the medication and Treatment available for positive people HIV AIDS remains a deadly disease we found that four out of five LGBT high school students have never seen a positive portrayal of a gay person in their curriculum at any point in their school life that's particularly unfortunate because the students who had seen positive portrayals were 27 % more likely to say they felt like they belonged at school when young people see themselves reflected in the curriculum reflected in the books in the library they feel much more like they belong at school they stay in school and they get an education though sexuality and gender are quite different things one cast of people in India live at the intersection hedas who are neither male nor female were once a revered class of Spiritual Beings serving as Court Unix for the ruling class the British Empire's colonization of India has exported negative attitudes and imposed Western beliefs on this once sacred group in tonight's real toore filmmakers Alexander Shiva and sha McDonald take us into the world of Bombay unic [Music] [Music] first [Music] hras have existed in India for thousands of years a HRA is actually a Hindi word for neither male nor female and that has been used to describe the Unix of India we met a group of hras who said that they would work with us and tell us our stories what we thought was going to be sort of a three-month art project kept becoming bigger than ourselves we hired an Indian camera crew um and and took on making a documentary if you speak to people's grandparents they usually say oh yes I remember when the hijas used to come when there was a wedding or there was a birth and and we welcome them and if you speak to someone's grandchild that same person would say oh I give you know I give them money just to make them go away traditionally they were believed to be closer to God because they were neither male nor female people believe that they have the power to bless or curse and so they would invite them to weddings and the birth of children and they would give them money to sing and dance and perform and think that by doing that that their child would be uh safe for lead a good life I'm not and now with Western ideas about gender coming into Indian culture they've sort of been reduced to the materiality of their bodies so instead of being considered special and neither they're considered strange and different modern hydras they're no longer imbued with power that they used to have and yet they still have the need to be within their own communities they still gravitate toward each other they still create kinship structures outside of their their family structures there are actually these different houses uh within Bombay with different lead uh hydras and then U sort of these lead mothers will adopt daughters um and they're accountable for their well-being and they take care of them and uh in return the daughters often give um some of their earnings to the mother there neither upper nor lower class they actually leave whatever the community they're from and often leave whatever religion they're from to join the hras and it's not actually necessarily that they go down they go into another community in today's society people are believing less and less in their power to bless or curse and so the Unix have been pushed into U begging and prostitution in order to survive traditionally HED are supposed to be sexually abstinent and Community Elders want to perpetuate this [Music] image we have a scene in the film where you know baby dancing on the train and she's just you know having the best time and everyone's clapping and it was wild I mean people just got so excited about her on the train and they started singing and and and clapping and that would never happen you know a traditional Indian woman is not going to get up and start you know shaking her booty you know on the train with a bunch of guys so certainly a lot of the hras are are sexualized in that way [Music] [Applause] I think what we realized through the film that ultimately this family that we worked with were transgendered people that they really uh identified as women they wanted to be women there is a place for a Third identity and therefore they they took up that place and it makes it very difficult to say you know if you were to take the these people and put them in the west they'd be this or they'd be that I think in India it's assumed that each person each individual has to live out their duty to the best of their abilities that's Dharma your Dharma and I think for hras they realize that that is their Dharma to be the best unic they can be and that if they you know if they do that then they will have perfectly fulfilled this life it's very reaffirming I think to see how these people will give up everything for this gender SL seexual identity and what we tried to bring to the film was just a tremendous amount of intellectual [Music] integrity and finally Tonight four-time Tony Award winner Harvey firestein goes home on a perfect spring day I made a pilgrimage to the neighborhood of my youth Park Slope Brooklyn new New York it had always been a familyfriendly area treelined Avenues choked with bustling school-bound kids mommies guiding strollers daddies chasing toddlers nannies pushing swings 20 years had not changed a thing except who the hell was guiding them strollers chasing them toddlers pushing them swings it was us lesbians and gay males parenting as far as the I could see I began to worry well not about the new breeding role of homosexuals but about usurping the usefulness of straits I mean now that we procreate with ease are heterosexuals obsolete years ago sociobiologist Edward O Wilson put forth his theory that homosexuals are absolutely necessary for the survival of the species he held that if homosexuality were not it surely would have been bred out millions of years ago via natural selection so why are we here we are the teachers who can stay late after school to Aid slower students we're the maiden aunts and Bachelor uncles who provide Financial cushioning in case of emergencies we are in his view the worker bees of humanity in a more recent book The Soul beneath the skin David nimons holds that we are a superior Society alog together we are he asserts the social and moral leaders of humanity using the AIDS crisis as back trop he sets out to illustrate that we are more nurturing altruistic nonviolent and even in the face of death funloving gays and lesbians are more open-minded and more available for Intimate Relationships not only with Partners but also with family and friends our volunteerism alone elevates us high above straight Society duia has no need to beg us to do our part there is certainly no argument against our our claim as artistic and cultural leaders of humanity without us heterosexual wardrobes would break down into two major categories fig leaves and grape leaves all anyone needs do is take a look at the art architecture and Home Furnishing Trends from the mid 80s through the late '90s you will find evidenced a vast black hole of invention when we lost a generation of gay men to the horror of AIDS the world missed an entire chapter of fact fashion music art and style oh you don't believe me get out your back issues of Vogue architectural digest and rolling stone so given our place as the innovators protectors teachers and keepers of Peace what role do heterosexuals play in society Beyond Warriors and track Toole drivers procreators us too so if that's all they have to offer who needs them keeping straight people around just to breed is like keeping that old office clunker that prints those curly faxes I mean why bother when you can get a machine that is a printer plain paper fact scanner and answering machine all in one beautiful package heterosexuals nothing but one trick ponies I'm telling you friends heterosexuals are a thing of the past like Britney Spears Andrew Lloyd Weber and Ron Reagan Jr so again I ask you do we need them of course we do there are kids besides if there were no heterosexuals who would play us on TV I'm Billy Porter and from all of us at end the life thanks for watching and we'll see you next month [Music] [Music] [Music] and [Music] [Music] [Music] in the life is funded in part by the H van amaran Foundation additional support provided by the Ford Foundation the Overbrook foundation and the annual support of in the Life members like you [Music]