To celebrate National Coming Out Day, OutSmart collaborated with the University of Houston students, asking them last month to share their coming out stories. Several students submitted entries, but OutSmart staff agreed that c’s story stood out as exceptional.
Elton John’s friendship with young Ryan White, who succumbed to AIDS in 1990, was only the beginning. Eighteen World AIDS Days later, the Elton John AIDS Foundation has raised more than $150 million to support the urgently needed programs throughout the United States and in 55 countries around the globe.
Twenty-one years ago, I heard a radio broadcast on Pacifica radio (KPFT 90.1 FM) about the Houston Police Department harassing gay men in local bars. I was glued to every word. I had been working for HPD for several years, and I was not out at work. Some months later, I was invited to host my own radio show on KPFT. I didn’t know how HPD would react, but I finally got the courage to do it.
Harvey Milk, one of the pivotal figures in the gay-rights movement, now has his brilliant-but-too-short life and career depicted on the big screen.
Assuming we don’t have another Bush-Gore debacle, in which wrinkled dotards in equally wrinkled black robes called the fight, the presidential election will be decided by us, the voters. But is our next commander-in-chief really the guy we elect?
Mark Doty, poet and memoirist, the first American to win Britain’s prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry (among a number of other literary honors), counts Houston as one of his three homes, each of which define a compartment in his career. In Houston, Doty holds a part-time professorship in creative writing at the University of Houston during one semester of each academic year. Recently, he sat down with OutSmart to reflect on the AIDS crisis and the wonderful spiritual gifts that our pets give so freely to us. He remembers Arden and Beau, his canine companions through the life-altering loss of his partner and the calamity of 9-11.
Cheryl Felps didn’t set out to be a doggie do-gooder, but she took to the task like a dog to a juicy bone.
The 32-year-old law firm employee already had a cute little cocker named Chloe four years ago when a friend asked her if she had weekend plans. When Felps said no, she wound up going on a transport mission to Falfurrias to pick up some rescues.
Donald Puryear sold a lucrative court reporting company and is a top realtor with Re/Max Metro. He doesn’t really have to work, which is why he thought that opening a franchised Happy Tails Dog Spa would be more of a hobby than anything else—just a way for him to hang out with dogs.
For the first time in its history, the Humane Society of the United States has endorsed a presidential candidate, throwing its support behind Barack Obama. The endorsement was made through the group’s Humane Society Legislative Fund.
‘It is the weak who are cruel; gentleness can only be expected from the strong.’ —Leo F. Buscaglia
A nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members,” Mahatma Gandhi once observed. But every society has its loose links . . . and when they break, heroic people have to step into the gaps and forge the links back together. One of those people is Houston’s Lt. Mark Timmers.
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