Articles in Features
It Gets Better for Native American Youth
“This is for all the LGBTQ Native youth throughout the country. From the villages in Alaska, to the Islands in Hawaii, to every corner of Indian Reservations across America… It Gets Better… we are living proof!!”
If you or someone you know is feeling alone, call the Trevor Project, they can help: 1-866-4U-TREVOR.
Watch the new It Gets Better video from the National Native American AIDS Prevention Center:
Things I have learned this year as Grand Duke XVIII
What is it really like to hold your first title in the Imperial Court of All Alaska? A few weeks before the step-down Ducal Ball, Fairbanks Grand Duke Lynnette wrote a list of lessons she learned during the year as Duke of Fairbanks. Although it’s specific to her reign, many of the lessons are true for titleholders in general.
Trans driver license lawsuit: Privacy & equal protection
Jillian T. Weiss, J.D., Ph.D., analyzes the legal issues of privacy and equal protection in the ACLU’s brief in K.L. v. State of Alaska, which involves Alaska DMV’s denial of a transgender woman’s driver’s license with a correct gender marker without proof of a surgical sex change.
Who writes Alaska’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)?
Alaska DMV based its refusal to put the correct gender marker on a transgender woman’s driver’s license on Alaska’s Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) D-24. Just who wrote SOP D-24, and what kind of review did it get before being used to make decisions affecting people’s lives?
Melissa Etheridge Radio Show on the air in Alaska
Melissa Etheridge has a new radio show, and an Anchorage station is one of the first in the country to pick up the full show.
KNLT Lite 105.7 in Anchorage, a light rock station, plays The Melissa Etheridge Show on weekdays from 7pm – midnight. Between songs, Melissa tells stories, answers questions from listeners, recognizes people who give to others, and chats with her cohost about the topic of the day. Email your questions to The Melissa Etheridge Show or call her at (855) 637-2346.
Listeners outside of Anchorage, Alaska can hear clips from the show online at The Melissa Etheridge Show or can hear the full show online at Lite 105.7 FM.
Melissa was asked about her new radio show in a recent interview:
Windy City Times: Tell me about this radio show that I saw on your website.
Melissa Etheridge: I am doing a radio show and I am on Bangor, Maine and Anchorage, Alaska. It is taking over the country right from the top down!
I am always looking for ways to reach out, be part of this whole entertainment world and yet not leave my home. That is the plan we are working on. I was approached about doing a radio show. I love to talk. I love to do music and like to be on the radio. So we started it. I am really enjoying it a lot. Hopefully we will get some more stations.
Windy City Times: Fans can listen to it on your website.
Melissa Etheridge: You can listen to it on the Internet at http:// www.melissaetheridge.com .
Windy City Times: Is it a time-consuming thing for you?
Melissa Etheridge: It’s not bad. It takes me about two hours a day. It is a music and talk so a lot of music. That’s why it only takes me about two hours to record it. The radio stations put in the music that they want.
Bent Alaska has a question for Melissa:
You’re performing in Bangor, Maine on July 23. As the only other town to pick up your show, does Anchorage get a concert too? Alaska loves you! Please come play here.
In June, Melissa called Lite 105.7 and talked with Program Director Justin McDonald about the midnight sun and salmon fishing. Listen to the short clip online HERE.
Lite 105.7 also promotes an anti-bullying campaign, and local ally Colleen Crinklaw is the DJ on Saturdays and Sundays from 7pm – midnight.
Lite 105.7 plays “light rock classics and today’s favorites” and is one of several local stations run by Alaska Integrated Media (AIM), including alternative rock station The End 94.7 which was at PrideFest this year.
Photo of Melissa Etheridge by Craig O’Neal via Wikimedia Commons; used in accordance with Creative Commons license.
Why should LGBT college students return to Alaska after graduation?
Bent Alaska received a great topic request from an Alaska-raised grad student who is studying in the lower 48: What is it like to be an openly LGBT professional in Alaska?
I’m a new reader to your blog and 18-year Alaskan. I left Alaska to go to university in 2005 and stayed for medical school. I’m currently in my seventh year. At my university there are usually about 5 or 6 kids from Alaska each year and inevitably, most are gay. In my year, only one of the kids from Alaska was not gay (and he was an awesome dude!)
It seems like a lot of young gay Alaskans get out of Alaska as soon as they can — that’s old news. What I’m interested in are those Alaskans who are gay who left, but went back.
Why did they choose to return? How have their experiences been? What is it like to be an out professional in Alaska? Rural v. urban? What kind of community awaits them? Did they return with a partner?
I’d love to read more in depth about this issue!
OK, readers — what do you think? Did you return after graduating from an out of state school? Tell us your reasons for returning, and what it’s like for you as an LGBT professional in Alaska. Leave a comment below, or email us directly at Bent Alaska @ gmail .com (without the spaces), and we will include your response in the follow up post. Help this university student and others decide where to start a career after graduation.
And if you have a topic you’d like to see on Bent Alaska, please tell us about it!
Photo: A crowd of college students at the 2007 Pittsburgh University Commencement, by Kit of Pittsburgh. Via Wikimedia Commons; used in accordance with Creative Commons licensing.
Alaska DMV refuses to put correct gender on drivers license; ACLU sues
The ACLU and the ACLU of Alaska have brought suit against the Alaska Division of Motor Vehicles over DMV’s refusal to put the correct gender marker on a transgender woman’s driver’s license without proof of a surgical sex change. The brief in the case, K.L. v. State of Alaska, can be read at at the ACLU or ACLU of Alaska websites.
Here is the ACLU of Alaska’s press release:
DMV Refusal to Correct Transgender Driver’s Licenses Unconstitutional
ACLU Lawsuit Challenges Requirement that Transgender Persons Undergo Surgery for Proper Gender on License
ANCHORAGE, AK, July 18, 2011 — The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Alaska filed a brief today seeking to allow transgender individuals to correct the gender marker on their driver’s licenses without undergoing major surgery. The state’s surgery requirement places an undue burden on transgender individuals and presents a gross violation of an individual’s right to privacy.
“It is unfair and unnecessary to require that transgender people undergo prohibitively expensive and drastic surgery in order to have accurate identity documents,” said Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the ACLU of Alaska. “No one should have to disclose sensitive personal information or be forced to make major medical decisions in order to get an accurate driver’s license.”
The lawsuit is being filed on behalf of a transgender woman, K.L., whose United States passport and work documents all identify her as a female. After initially securing a change to the gender on her driver’s license, she was told that her new license would be revoked unless she submitted proof of having surgery. The American Psychiatric Association and medical experts agree that surgery is medically necessary for some with gender identity disorder (GID), but not for everyone. Treatment for GID is individualized, and some can be effectively treated without it, making it unnecessary for the state to confirm whether or not an individual has had surgery before correcting a license. Additionally, such surgery is extremely expensive and potentially dangerous. The State Department no longer requires transgender people to have surgery before it will correct the gender marker on passports and a growing number of states have stopped requiring surgery for changing the gender marker on a driver’s license.
“Having a driver’s license that doesn’t match my appearance and identity would place me at risk of discrimination and physical harm,” said K.L., who has lived as a woman for two years.
The state supreme court has found that the Alaska Constitution’s privacy clause protects individuals’ right to self-expression and to be free from the disclosure of sensitive personal information and government intrusions on their decisions about medical care.
“The surgery requirement not only violates Alaska’s laws, it demonstrates a profound lack of understanding about what it means to be transgender,” said John Knight, staff attorney with the ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Project. “The state cannot deny transgender people an accurate driver’s license based on an arbitrary and unconstitutional policy that clashes with accepted medical standards.”
The brief can be found on the ACLU websites at www.aclu.org and www.akclu.org.
Attorneys include Knight of the ACLU Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender Project, Thomas Stenson of the ACLU of Alaska Foundation, and Stephanie Boehl of Perkins Coie.
On being a greenie gay girl in a man’s mining camp, or, Don’t judge others for what they must do to survive: Part one
by Taylor
We know what it is to be willing to do, quite literally, anything to make something work, to make it through another month, week or day. First of a series. See Part Two.
It’s a hop, skip, and a short trip in a puddle-jumper from civilization to the Small South here in The Greatland. I am surrounded by people that I ordinarily would not socialize with, even in the outer constellations in the outer revolutions of the small sky that makes up my circles of friends.
Not that I am “snobby,” or looking down my nose; there is only so far that a mutual love of (or lust for) women will go, and the camp is predominantly male roughnecks. There are a total of nine women in camp, on a good week, and even the younger men have a certain amount of chauvinism about them — one of the young men here recently told me I could be “really beautiful” if I just grew out my hair, and proceeded to proposition me with money to do so. Thankfully, I have a good sense of humor, and laughed…and then told him I stopped doing things to please others a long while ago, and am a better person for it.
The world I occupy for much of my summer is so different from my usual comfort zone, and I find myself spending my days listening to Ani and other revolutionary folk singers to hang onto myself when I find that I am slipping from myself. Compartmentalization comes easily, and I develop an outer shell not unlike the one that got me through high school, my gay growing pains, and coming out to my dad’s side of the family: Tough, hard, weathered titanium, with very few chinks or gaps in the plating.
I become someone else, begin to will myself to not care too much, to remind myself of why I am here — to patch people up when they get injured, and to make money. “Mercenary” is the word one of my volunteer Fire/EMS colleagues used once to describe me, and I’ve decided it fits painfully well. I have sold my ethics, sold my soul — if ever I had one to begin with, sold my sense of self-worth, of feminism, of right, of wrong….sold what makes me, me, and my politics, mine. I have sold all, if only for these last two years, because of one horrible thing: It pays well enough to allow me to survive.
The economy has taken such a dip, that a multi-certified, CDL-papered, degree-carrying, enterprising individual such as myself could apply to thirty different jobs in a two-month period (yes, I counted), and hear back from no one. And then I was offered this position. I am a medic, in a camp of about sixty people, in the middle of nowhere, in Alaska. The catch? It’s a camp for mineral exploration. It represents everything that I’ve resisted in resisting Capitalism’s takeover, and many, if not a vast majority, of my fellow campmates hold worldviews that directly oppose my own.
I hear racial slurs I thought long dead in anything resembling civilized society on a daily basis. I see the few women that are here, pushed to the breaking point. I am told that I am a “masculine female,” and thereby “one of the boys,” and “okay to hang with.” Ironic, how my dykedom, my DIFFERENCE, one of my many facets of divisiveness, is what binds me to these men, in their eyes. I am told I am valuable; I am told that I am a good worker; I am praised for my skills, my drive, my prodigious work ethic.
I do not tell them that I work so hard, impress so much, so that I can earn a raise…and get out. I have continued to apply for work in my time with this company, to no avail. So, I have determined that I will bust my fictitious balls in order to pay off what remains of my student debt, and thereby free myself, if only financially. I actually have difficulty sleeping, some nights, knowing what I do, and who I work for. The latter, of course, is the problem. I love my work…if only this country were willing to pay taxes to insure that the entirety of its Fire/EMS personnel were paid (the statistical average for paid emergency personnel hovers somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five percent…the rest are volunteer, or part-time, at best).
There are far worse ways to do this, but my point in this tidbit of opinion, on my admission of being one of those hardened realists that will do what they have to, if it means feeding their households, is that we should recognize it in others. As a community, we know what it is to be willing to do, quite literally, anything to make something work, to make it through another month, week or day. Not everyone can find a job — that will actually feed them — in activism or at the local co-op. Not all of us have politically correct positions, or even co-workers. Some of us have been reduced to existing in some hellish hybrid of the 1940s and the current era in order to make it through another year.
This one for you, James Crump
James Crump came to Alaska to find himself, and stayed in Alaska to share himself with us. His death on June 25 at Anchorage’s Pride parade was a blow not only to his family & friends, but also to our whole community. But just what is our community — and where do we go from here?
Doug Frank: Grand Marshal for Alaska Pride Fest 2011
Doug Frank has been announced as tthe Grand Marshall for Alaska Pride Fest 2011. Alaska Pride Fest provided this biography documenting Frank’s decades of service to the LGBTQA community of Alaska, including his work with World AIDS Day and the Names Project Quilt, cofounding of the annual Pride Conference, and the 20012 Pride Month display at Anchorages’s Loussace Library.
