The Atlanta Gay Men's Chorus will hold a private shopping bonanza and fundraiser tomorrow night at Jonathan Adler from 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. The event, a celebration to mark the end of the AGMC's 30th season, will feature summer drinks and light bites provided by Radial Cafe.
Attendees are encouraged to make a purchase or three as a portion of all the sales during the event will go directly to the AGMC.
Melvin Arundelli, 34, was born in Italy but has lived in Atlanta since he was just over a year old. Four years ago this month, he crashed his motorcycle into a telephone pole, and suffered severe traumatic brain injury. He was hospitalized at Grady for five months and in a coma for most of that time.
Arundelli now uses a wheelchair, has limited movement in his left arm, is legally blind and can’t smell or taste. But he’s alive, he says, and his sense of humor remains firmly intact.
“Meet Boosheka,” he says, inviting friends to sit on the comfy cushion on his wheelchair.
“She’s my girlfriend. The best thing I got when I left Grady,” he adds with a laugh.
Sound is often the string that holds the LGBT community together, from biting comments from a drag queen to protest chants at the capitol. Being unable to hear can leave some LGBT people feeling shut out.
“To me sound systems and megaphones are useless, so unless there’s an interpreter present, I can’t understand what’s going on,” says Jeffrey Payne, a former International Mr. Leather and founder of the Sharon St. Cyr Fund, which helps LGBT people pay for hearing aides and provides interpreters to gay events.
Dustin Neighbors has been slowly losing his hearing for years, and is starting to become a minority within a minority — a hearing-impaired gay man.
Serving its community in Little 5 Points for 11 years, Sweetgrass Salon & Spa started out as simply a hair salon. Described by manager Brian Baj as having been a “come-in/clipper cut kind of thing,” Sweetgrass took cues from the bohemian environment of its Little 5 Points neighborhood to transform into the salon and spa it is today. “Massage therapists started coming in and, lo and behold, before you know it, it’s now a full-functioning spa,” Baj says.
A quick look around the salon shows the full glory of that statement.
Sweetgrass is not your typical fountain-and-zen whitewashed spa. Like the community around it, it is as vibrant and colorful as a rainbow, with enough swirls and shades to make even peacocks think twice about challenging it.
Sitting in Outwrite Bookstore, awash in Sunday morning light, Monique Carry appears radiant as she speaks about the All My Children project’s unique marriage of academic research and social justice. AMC is the nonprofit organization that Carry co-founded with her research partner Shannon J. Miller in order to help African-American LGBT youth and their families. Carry and Miller serve as co-executive directors of the group.
AMC works to understand the dynamics of LGBT youth and their families and communities, and “raise awareness about the consequences of anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning bias within African American families, faith centers, and communities,” states the group’s website.
Carry elaborates on this, saying that both LGBT youth of color and white LGBT youth deal with many of the same issues, though in uniquely different ways, leading to social isolation. AMC understands that the social isolation faced by African-American youth dealing with sexual orientation and gender identity is created in part by growing up within a culture that does not address these issues.
After two months of online balloting and thousands of votes cast, we present the best of the best — our second annual GA Voice Best of Atlanta winners.
The selection process began in May, when we asked you, our readers, to nominate your favorites for dozens of awards in the categories of Community, People, Places, Eats, Shopping, Arts & Entertainment and Nightlife.
The top three finalists in each category made it through to the next round of voting. For the month of June, a multiple-choice ballot asked you to pick among the finalists for who really represents the finest in LGBT Georgia.
Thanks to everyone who voted, and congratulations to all of the worthy winners and runners up.
Live Well Chiropractic has been serving the Atlanta community since 1999 when Dr. Kristy Francavilla and Dr. Shoshana Kreinces opened in a small office space in the UA Tara Cinemas strip mall complex.
After outgrowing the 800-square foot space on Cheshire Bridge Road, the doctors bought a house across the street from Joe’s on Juniper in Midtown, and for the last six months have been treating clients in the new state-of-the-art facility.
“It took about a year-and-a-half to build out. We customized everything and we’re 95 percent paperless,” says Kreinces. “All the tables are connected to a computer, so we can access files and their history right there without all the paperwork we had before.”
On May 22, Rev. Michael Piazza was officially installed as Virginia-Highland Church’s new senior pastor. Originally from Georgia, Piazza was the pastor at Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, the largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender church in the nation. The church cited just 280 members when Piazza took the helm in 1987 and eventually reached a membership of more than 3,500 people.