By Karen Mizoguchi — 2021
“I can’t wait for people to laugh along with me as I attempt to make sense of some of our most pressing issues,” Jonathan Van Ness tells PEOPLE.
Read on people.com
CLEAR ALL
The Advancing Acceptance campaign seeks to raise awareness about the importance of family acceptance for transgender and gender-nonconforming youth.
The sound of drums, singing and prayers marked the opening of a powwow in Phoenix on a Saturday afternoon this month. . . . It was Arizona’s first Two-Spirit Powwow, one of a handful of powwows that have sprung up across North America to celebrate LGBT Native Americans.
“If LGBTQ people get assaulted or beaten up in a hate crime on tribal land, it’s often not prosecuted,” one advocate said.
1
“In Latin America, there’s been a great deal of progress around gay and lesbian identities,” Ortiz says. “But with being transgender and non-binary, a lot of people are still unsure what it all means and I believe it’s connected to the words we use.”
Ideas of visibility and the closet have largely been shaped by white America and the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. Refusing to subscribe to this narrative gives us space to connect with our gender, our culture and our sexuality on our own terms.
Bisexual adults are much less likely than gays and lesbians to be “out” to the important people in their lives, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of survey data from Stanford University.
The term “Two Spirit” in Native American culture often describes a person possessing both male and female spirits. And they’ve been around well before the Santa Maria or the Mayflower dropped anchor.
These black women and gender-nonconforming individuals have created a space for other young girls and nonbinary persons to feel seen and heard.
Coming out isn’t always easy. It’s when a person decides to reveal an important part of their identity to someone in their life. For many LGBTQ people, this involves sharing their sexual orientation and/or gender identity.
Coming out as non-binary transformed the lives of these five Americans. Here are their stories.