www.GayPeoplesChronicle.com⚫ April 20, 2012 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 3

Stark diversity group hires new executive director

by Anthony Glassman

Canton-After a 32-month search, Coming Together Stark County announced on April 12 that Remel K. Moore has been hired to the position of executive director of the organization.

Coming Together Stark County was formed in 1998 as the Stark County Town Hall on Race Relations, in the wake of President Bill Clinton's visit to Akron and his call for a national conversation on race relations. Rabbi Jon Spitzer and Ron Ponder formed the agency, putting together a board of directors.

Fourteen years later, Spitzer is board chair, founding board member Lois DiGiacomo of the Rainbow Repertory Company is still active and other stalwarts remain involved. The scope of their mission has expanded. While the group continues to address issues of race, their diversity training and advocacy work run the gamut, including very

active efforts on behalf of the LGBT community in Stark County.

Moore succeeds Nadine McIlwainMassey, who retired at the end of 2011. Moore was the vice president of student life and dean of student affairs at Hood College in Frederick, Md., and headed the U.S. Education and Cultural Foundation in Liberia, as well as being the executive director of the W.E.B. DuBois Center for African Culture in Accra, the capital of Ghana.

"We are pleased that Remel has accepted the position of executive director," Spitzer said. "We know that with her leadership, Coming Together will continue to impact all people by fulfilling our mission of serving as a catalyst and agent to promote inclusion and open opportunity for the diverse population of Stark County."

"Today's level of intolerance is rising at surprising levels," Moore remarked. “There

Remel K. Moore

are greater instances of incivility at our work sites and in public places as well as increased bullying in our schools. Coming Together Stark County urges people, adults and youth, to view our diverse world through a lens of acceptance and tolerance."

The group was the largest financial backer of bringing Jamie Nabozny to speak to Canton students last fall. Nabozny was the first student to sue his school district for failing to stop anti-gay bullying and harassment. The Ashland, Wisconsin district settled in 1996 for close to $1 million.

Coming Together Stark County also took the Canton Repository to task for refusing to print same-sex engagement announcements.

"Coming Together Stark County has never been recognized for what it does by the LGBT community, and this is a good time to do it," noted a community activist who has worked with the organization.

Man shoots his partner in domestic violence incident

by Anthony Glassman

Columbus-Domestic violence came to the LGBT community of central Ohio on April 6, although there is some question as to who the abuser was.

John Reed, 54, told police he shot his partner, 56-year-old Jeffrey Caldwell, in selfdefense after Caldwell started beating him during an argument. Reed says he grabbed a .22 caliber revolver and shot Caldwell when he cornered him in the bathtub.

Reed has been charged with murder, and

bail was set at a quarter million dollars in a hearing on April 9.

Reed himself called the police, telling the dispatcher that he shot Caldwell because "He was killing me, he was trying to kill me," according to the Columbus Dispatch. Caldwell allegedly shoved him against a wall before he shot him.

Reed is a retired employee of the Ohio State University Medical Center. Caldwell worked in the wine department of a Kroger

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grocery store, where he organized wine tastings and live music.

According to one of Caldwell's coworkers, the couple had split up but they were still living together.

The incident underscores the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs' 2010 report on same-sex intimate partner violence, which found a 38 percent increase in reports of domestic violence among samesex couples, with a commensurate increase

in the severity of the violence.

The report showed an increase from 36 percent to 55 percent of survivors reporting physical violence in their abusive relationships.

The Buckeye Region Anti-Violence Organization is Columbus' member of the NCAVP, and urges community members experiencing intimate partner violence to report it and contact them. BRAVO can be reached at 614-294-7867 or www.bravoohio.org.

Obama won't sign 'contractor ENDA' executive order

Washington, D.C.-President Barack Obama will not sign an executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating by gender identity or sexual orientation.

The measure would have added to an existing order that already includes factors like race, religion, age and gender.

LGBT advocates learned of his decision in a meeting on April 11 with Obama aides Valerie Jarrett and Cecilia Munoz. They were told, however, that the president would urge federal agencies and outside corporations to oppose discrimination themselves. Winnie Stachelberg, the executive vice president of the Center for American Progress, had a sharp response to the news.

"These types of policies are supported by nearly 75 percent of Americans, many of the nation's largest and most prominent Fortune 500 corporations, and nearly two-thirds of all small business owners, based on findings from a 2011 Center for American Progress survey," she noted. "It has been shown time and time again... that gay and transgender people face disproportionately high rates of discrimination in the workplace and that policies that protect employees are also good for business and the economy at large."

"Just as Congress should pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act now, the president should now also use his executive authority to extend existing nondiscrimination requirements of federal contractors to cover workers who are gay and transgender," she continued.

First charges under hate crime law

Louisville, Ky.-Two eastern Kentucky men are the first in the nation to face federal hate crime charges under the Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Act for allegedly beating a gay man in a park.

David Jason Jenkins, 37, and his cousin Anthony Ray Jenkins, 20, were indicted by a federal grand jury in mid-April for the attack last April on Kevin Pennington, 28, which left him with numerous injuries.

The two Jenkinses pleaded not guilty to the charges on April 12, stemming from the

attack in Kingdom Come State Park. Pennington had gone for a ride with the men. David Jenkins' attorney said Pennington knew his client.

Pennington told police that David Jenkins demanded a sexual act from him, but he refused. He said that Jenkins then threatened to rape him.

When the truck stopped for a tree fallen across the road, the Jenkins men pulled him out and beat him. According to the federal indictment, they intended to kill him. He told police he escaped during a full in the attack, and hid in the woods.

Two women in the truck, Anthony Jenkins' wife and his cousin, have pleaded guilty to charges in the case. Both are 19.

The FBI affidavit said that the men called Pennington anti-gay epithets while beating him.

The Shepard-Byrd act, passed in 2009, added real or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity, race, color, national origin and religion to federal hate crime law.

Researcher repudiates 'ex-gay' paper

New York City-Columbus University researcher Dr. Robert Spitzer, who was involved in the 1973 removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Assocation's diagnostic manual, is repudiating a 2001 paper he wrote asserting that "ex-gay" therapy can change sexual orientation.

He told American Prospect, "In retrospect, I have to admit I think the critiques are largely correct. The finding can be considered evidence for what those who have undergone ex-gay therapy say about it, but nothing more.

""

While he refutes his earlier paper, and offered to write a retraction for the journal that published it, he is still very proud of working in 1973 to have homosexuality removed as a mental illness.

"Had there been no Bob Spitzer, homosexuality would still have eventually been removed from the list of psychiatric disorders, but it wouldn't have happened in 1973," he said.

Miss Universe now open to TG women

Los Angeles-The Miss Universe Pageant's 2013 season will be open to transgender women, a move the organization said it planned before attorney Gloria Allred threatened legal action.

The change was announced in early April, when Jenna Talackova, a 23-year-old Canadian, was told she could compete as long as she meets the legal requirements to be considered female in Canada.

The Miss Universe Pageant is owned by Donald Trump, who sent a searingly inappropriate Twitter response to Allred's attack on him during the press conference threatening a lawsuit.

Paula Shugart, the president of the Miss Universe organization, said the credit for Talackova's acceptance should go to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and not to Allred. She cited ongoing discussions with GLAAD, accusing Allred of delaying the process.

Talackova had won a regional feeder title, but was disqualified from the Miss Canada Universe competition.

Study: Homophobes are closet cases

Rochester, N.Y.-In a confirmation of what many people have suspected for years, a new study in the April Journal of Personality and Social Psychology finds that homophobes quite often have secret samesex desires.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Rochester, the University

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of Essex in England and the University of California Santa Barbara, states that homophobia is more visible in people with unspoken same-sex attractions who had authoritarian parents.

Co-author Richard Ryan of Rochester said that these people are "at war with themselves" and "turning this internal conflict outward," according to Science News Daily.

The research covers four separate experiments in Germany and the United States, each with a sample size of about 160 college students.

Suit seeks end to Nevada marriage ban

Las Vegas—A septuagenarian couple are the lead plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit against Nevada's marriage ban filed on April 10 by the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund.

The two women, Beverly Sevcik and Mary Baranovich, have been together for over 40 years, and their suit against Gov. Brian Sandoval in federal court is considered a strategic move. If the case is appealed by either party, it will go to the same appeals court that ruled against California's Prop. 8.

The suit says that there is no "legitimate, let alone important or compelling," reason to bar same-sex couples from marrying, especially since Nevada has civil unions.

Lambda Legal and the outside attorneys working on the case are suing solely on equal protection claims, and not on a due process claim. That also parallels the DeContinue on page 6

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