Articles in Bent Alaska
A long-overdue Bent Alaska update — October 2013
Bent Alaska’s blog will continue in hiatus indefinitely; but the Bent Alaska Facebook Group on Facebook is thriving — join us! A long-overdue update from Bent Alaska’s editor.
A word from our editor…
Bent Alaska editor Mel Green will be taking a “semi-hiatus” during November 2012 to focus on her writing. This doesn’t mean complete silence — but she will be scaling back.
Bent Alaska: Under construction
Bent Alaska is taking advantage of the long Memorial Day weekend to work on a long-anticipated redesign. It’s a mess! — but it’ll get prettier, & much more easy to find stuff stuff, too. In fact, it’s already easier to find stuff.
Last Frontier Drag Kings Post-New Year’s Bash — this Saturday
Join the Last Frontier Drag Kings this Saturday for their After New Year’s Bash at the S Lounge! The Drag Kings will have some surprise guests, and their auction fundraiser will benefit Bent Alaska.
Happy Thanksgiving from Bent Alaska
Jeff Zarrillo and his partner Paul Katami are plaintiffs in the nationally-watched Prop 8 trial and appeared with co-plaintiffs Perry and Sandy Stier in a video from the American Foundation for Equal Rights discussing the importance of family and this Thanksgiving holiday. Happy Thanksgiving from Bent Alaska to you and your family — no matter what your family looks like.
A new editor for Bent Alaska
E. Ross started Bent Alaska on March 13, 2008. She looks back over all the changes that Bent Alaska has gone through since, as she hands responsibility over to a new editor.
Bent News, 9/28/11: Census data on same-sex married couples
Bent Alaska tweets the news, data from the 2010 U.S. Census on same-sex married couples, a “This Gets Better” video, and more in this edition of Bent News.
Tweeting the news
- Bent Alaska has added (we think) Selective Tweets to our FB profile (as well as page), so we can share news when we’re out & about. #
Bent Alaska has added the Selective Tweets app to our Facebook profile, so we can easily share news with our Facebook friends when we’re out and about — merely by adding a simple #fb hashtag to any tweet we wish. You can also follow us directly on Twitter @bentalaska.
But what if you’re not on Facebook or Twitter? We’ve also added a plugin called Twitter Tools to our blog, which will automatically creates a daily post from our tweets. And suddenly Bent News is reborn: a daily (at least when we tweet) summary of some of the interesting stuff we’ve found around the web. As we’re able, we’ll also supplement it with other news, photos, videos, etc., to try to make it interesting & informative. Our Bent News posts will post the day after the tweets were made.
Let us know how we’re doing! Write to us at bentalaska [at] gmail [dot] com.
Census data on same-sex married couples
- Census Bureau reports 131,729 same-sex married couples, and 646,464 gay couples in the country overall. http://t.co/NdHUdImC #
One of our Facebook friends asked, “Was there a category for LGBTQ persons overall?” Our answer: Not yet. Single people couldn’t self-identify as LGBTQ on the 2010 Census, so there’s no data on how many of us live in the U.S. We’ve got to get that added for 2020!
There’s a campaign by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force (NGTLF) to do just that, called Queer the Census (Facebook page). In its blog post about the Census Bureau’s newly released data on same-sex couples, the Task Force writes,
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force played a key role in getting the U.S. Census Bureau to report the number of married same-sex couples in the 2010 census, and continues to work with policymakers to ensure lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people are included in a broad swath of federal surveys and data collection.
See the U.S. Census Bureau’s official press release on the data.
Other tweets
- Biblical arguments for LGBT equality? Yes. @LambdaLiterary reviews God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality http://t.co/nPGV8TRw #
- Right wing claims TX student’s religious freedom being violated by teacher he harassed b/c he thinks teacher is gay http://t.co/i4lAVL2H #
Shared on our Facebook wall
“All the bullies I’ve known were insensitive jerks.” — so says Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia in this video for the It Gets Better Project. Watch:
A personal note from a Bent Alaskan
By this time, four days after the accidental death of James Crump at the Anchorage Pride parade, some people must feel as if Bent Alaska is in a 24/7 crisis mode… and as if we are writing about nothing else, nothing that might take people’s minds off the sadness that so much of Anchorage’s LGBTQA community has been feeling these past few days. That’s kind of what I’ve been thinking too. And so I thought it might be helpful to explain a little about what’s going on at Bent Alaska right now.
Bringing Netroots home to Alaska
Our fatigued reporter’s last report from Minneapolis, because by the time you read this, she’ll be on a plane on the way back to Anchorage. But she’ll have more to say about Netroots Nation and LGBT Netroots Connect and some of the stuff she learned there to benefit — at least so we hope — the LGBT community(s) of Alaska — once she’s able to decompress & unpack it.
A Big Wild Lesbian at Netroots Nation
In which our erstwhile reporter dons her Radical Arts for Women t-shirt, which confers superpowers sufficient to push through another day of (mostly) interesting sessions at Day 2 of Netroots Nation, despite far too little downtime and an overabundance of stress hormones.
