EDGEonthenet.com reported that a transgender woman, Ashley Santiago, was found stabbed to death in her home outside San Juan on Monday, April 19, 2010.

Police said Santiago had been stabbed 14 times. Investigators have yet to determine whether Santiago’s killer (or killers) murdered her because of her gender identity or expression

Santiago’s death comes a little more than five months after Jorge Steven López Mercado’s brutal murder stunned Puerto Rico. Prosecutors contend Juan A. Martínez Matos decapitated, dismembered and partially burned the gay teenager’s body before dumping it along a remote roadside near Cayey on Nov. 13, 2009.

Puerto Rico’s hate crime law includes both sexual orientation and gender identity. The statutes took effect in 2002, but prosecutors rarely apply it.

To read the rest of the article, click here.

This is a piece I wrote that was originally published in the online magazine, Queer Magazine.

Being gay and a person of faith is not easy, no matter what your religion. While I’m not suggesting you must believe, it is possible to be gay and a believer. The two are not mutually exclusive.

A contemporary theologian, Marcus Borg, writes about “thin places,” those times when the dividing line between our own life and the presence of God is very thin. A friend of mine, raised a Roman Catholic, said he left the church because he came to know that he was a good person, and he could not accept the judgment of the church. Although many gay people have left organized religion for that reason, many of us continue to seek those thin places.

I was raised in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America whose policy it is that if you are homosexual, you are expected to abstain from sexual relationships. The church accepted me while I was growing up and during the 18 years I was married to a woman, so when I came out at age 40, I rejected the idea that I had suddenly become a bad person. I once thought I would always be a Lutheran, but they didn’t seem to want me any more and after many years of attempting to find a welcoming place in the Lutheran Church, I withdrew from church altogether. Yet, I always felt like something was missing.

Borg wrote in The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith, that believing in the literal interpretation of the Bible and the infallibility of the Pope are relatively recent ideas in the Christian tradition. Many people turn away from Christianity when they cannot reconcile their own beliefs with it insistence on belief in certain doctrines and belief in events such as the creation, the flood and walking on water. Borg suggests the Bible should be taken seriously, just not literally.

The Rev. Candace Chellew-Hodge wrote Bulletproof Faith: A Spiritual Survival Guide for Gay and Lesbian Christians. She advocates that the Bible should be understood in its complete context rather than interpreted literally. She discusses the “clobber passages” in the Bible that are said to prove homosexuality is sinful (Genesis 19 Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 Deuteronomy 23:17-18 Judges 19 Kings 14:24 and 15:12 Romans 1:26 I Corinthians 6:9 I Timothy 1:19 Jude 7). Somewhat controversially, she also recommends that the gay community begin to show acceptance and understanding of those who use religion against us. She wrote, “Work out your own demons, and the perceived demons in others suddenly disappear.”

Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, but it is also sharply fragmented, just as Christianity is. Reza Aslan wrote in No God but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam that within a few generations of the Prophet’s death, seven hundred thousand accounts of Muhammad’s words and deeds were in circulation.

As a psychiatrist, I recognize that many in my profession consider the need for a religious faith to be neurotic. I also know that memories are less and less accurate, the further removed they are from the event. The written account of Jesus life did not begin until several decades after his life, ensuring even at the time of the original recording, various interpretation of events would occur. It appears that many interpretations of both the Bible and the Koran (Qur’an) many be fabricated by individuals who sought to legitimize their own particular beliefs, but they justify these interpretations as being divinely inspired.

What is interesting is that both Jesus and Muhammad are so frequently misrepresented by their most passionate followers. Both reached out to those who were disenfranchised and challenged the conventional wisdom of their time, and they did so, not by producing one more set of new laws, but by offering insights that challenged people to develop deeper understandings. In fact, those who were responsible for rigid ideologies were often the targets of their greatest criticisms.

Those values and traditions that we inherit from our families are so deeply incorporated into our being that they are very difficult to challenge, but that is where change must begin. As we mature, we begin to see that our parents were not perfect and the structure of religious dogma is cracked. It is possible for each of us to blow up this inherited value system, and to salvage the most important remnants as building blocks for a new and personal value system. This is the essential step in moving beyond the guilt and shame which religion has created for gay men and women.

The process begins by hearing the voices of those who have various interpretations of religious truths and recognizing that religions have evolved through the centuries and will continue to do so. The church that I attend now believes that God is still speaking and continues to reveal his truths to us, including those about homosexuality.

A useful website resource for further discussion about religion and homosexuality is “Religious Tolerance.”

This from the New York Times by Jon Mooallem, Published: March 29, 2010

Laysan albatrosses are one of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical. It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young’s colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for 4, 8 or even 19 years — as far back as the biologists’ data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody’s nose for what you might call “straight” couples.

Young would never use the phrase “straight couples.” And she is adamantly against calling the other birds “lesbians” too. For one thing, the same-sex pairs appear to do everything male-female pairs do except have sex, and Young isn’t really sure, or comfortable judging, whether that technically qualifies them as lesbians or not. But moreover, the whole question is meaningless to her; it has nothing to do with her research. “ ‘Lesbian,’ ” she told me, “is a human term.”

To read the entire article, click here.

This article appeared on AKA William: All Kinds of Gay, on April 2, 2010. It appears that their is growing awareness of mature LGBT men and women and more activism related to Gay Boomers.

Of particular interest to me is the recognition of our importance by AARP. I hope you’ll read the article in full and click on some of the links.

LGBT seniors have received great press in recent weeks. Senior group SAGE received grants. The AARP and the American Society on Aging joined a gay-led Medicaid and social security fight. And their were stories about gays who come out late in life. These stories aren’t unfolding in a vacuum, nor are they only important to elders. What happens in the realm of LGBT senior legislation will impact us all, and sooner than we think.

To read the rest of the link, click here.

This post, “The Unconscious Politics That Shape Our World, Choose Presidents and Save or Destroy Lives“, was recently posted on Alternet.

There is increasing scientific evidence that human behavior is not rational or conscious, and may be completely programmed without logic or knowledge.

These unconscious drives affect jury decisions, elections, wars, our everyday experiences and can sometimes determine life and death. This is the subject of two recent books: Shankar Vedantam’s The Hidden Brain: How our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save our Lives, and Guillermo Jimenez’s Red Genes, Blue Genes, Exposing Political Irrationality. Both demonstrate irrationality but from slightly from different places. This essay on Alternet has interviews with these authors.

Although the post relates more to politics than it does to human sexuality, I found this paragraph particularly interesting:

MA: Similarly, you point out the unconscious roles with race and gender. Even when people are conscientiously trying not to have prejudices, they are still programmed and affect us.

SV: Yes, the unconscious bias affects our romantic decisions, our financial decisions, our moral decisions, our political decisions. One of the domains is the question of unconscious prejudice. The striking thing here is that we pay a lot of attention to hate crimes or people who explicitly say racist things or sexist things. But it turns out that at an unconscious level, prejudice exists in very large numbers of people, perhaps even among most people. These effects are subtle; they’re not the person who is burning a cross on someone else’s lawn. This is a person who may have an unconscious association in [his or her] head. But when asked to make a decision about whether somebody is guilty or innocent of a crime, or whether to hire someone for a job, these unconscious associations play very powerful roles, especially because most people do not believe the unconscious exists. And so we have no way to guard against the manipulation because we don’t even realize that we’re being manipulated.

MA: One of the most convincing parts of your book dealing with gender bias was the experiences of transgendered people. People who transgendered from women to men suddenly — although the same person, same qualifications, same education — had a better income, opportunity and less interruptions.

SV: That’s right. There is abundant research showing that, on average, women are not paid the same as men and face all kinds of challenges compared to men. But when you’re asked to make a judgment about any individual person — say Hillary Clinton in the 2008 presidential election — it’s very difficult to apply the general research on bias to an individual, because with any individual circumstance, there are many other factors: How good a candidate is Hillary Clinton, what are her positions on the issues; what’s the competition like? And so on.

This series of interviews is definitely worth of a look.