In the midst of the battle for equal rights for the transgender community, individuals are standing up one by one,...
What role does social media play in the lives of LGBTQ people? Good question.
Salon LGBTQ, an inclusive social media conference, opens Friday in Atlanta with a welcome reception at the Renaissance Atlanta Midtown Hotel, with plans to try to shed some light on how LGBTQ people and writers and bloggers and business owners can best use social media to advance their causes.
Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, will be in Atlanta Saturday for the “Beyond Pain to Wholeness: Overcoming the Stigma” conference hosted by Healing of the Heart Ministries.
The conference is being hosted at the Georgia International Convention Center in College Park, Ga., from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and will focus on a range of topics from sexual abuse to homosexuality.
Chambers, who is the conference's luncheon keynote speaker, has been the head of Exodus International since 2001. Exodus is a Christian-rooted organization “offering a biblical message about same-sex attraction,” according to its website.
The Creating Change Conference, billed as the “nation's pre-eminent political, leadership and skills-building conference for the LGBT social justice movement,” comes to Atlanta in January to celebrate its 25th anniversary. The massive event is sponsored by the National Lesbian & Gay Task Force.
Michael Shutt, a member of the host committee and the director of the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Life at Emory University, said now is the time for Creating Change to come to the Southeast.
“The conference has not been in Atlanta since 2000 and so much has changed in the city and the region. This is an opportunity to bring many communities together to learn, engage in skills building, and network,” he said.
For most of life, Blake Alford was enveloped by solitude.
From the ostracism experienced coming of age in the 1950s and ‘60s – getting beaten up and kicked down the stairs at school for being queer – to more than 30 years on the road driving a truck, Alford was used to feeling alone.
And sharing one’s own company can be particularly isolating when you are at war with yourself, when your body and your mind have dueling definitions of who you are.
“Being behind the wheel of a truck, you don’t see very many libraries, you don’t hear very much about being transgender, especially back during that time, so I didn’t have any information about it,” said Alford, who, at age 56, transitioned from female-to-male almost a decade ago.
Atlanta will be the host city for the 25th annual "National Conference on LGBT Equality: Creating Change" sponsored by the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force.
The Task Force announced today four metro Atlantans who will serve as co-chairs for the conference that brings people together from around the country. It is set for Jan. 23-27, 2013.
The co-chairs are: