By Greg Hernandez There’s a reason celebrity chef and restauranteur Susan Feniger was so eager to show young people from the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Youth Center how to make dishes from produce they had grown themselves. “I think food, eating and gardening is very nurturing to the soul and all of us need nurturing,” she explained. So Feniger, a member of the Center’s board of directors, recently set up a makeshift kitchen at the Mansfield Community Garden where more than a dozen youths interacted with the charismatic chef who has logged many hours on various television cooking shows. “Doesn’t…
Author: Kelly Freter
By Greg Hernandez Members of the Center’s Community Embedded Disease Intervention Specialists (CEDIS) team work on the forefront of stemming the tide of STIs in Los Angeles. Their work begins after someone tests positive for syphilis or HIV at one of the Center’s testing facilities. “We’re then to help folks contact their sexual partners after a positive text. Our goal is to identify those who may have been exposed to an STI and encourage them to get tested,” says team leader Johnny Cross. “Even when someone is upset upon receiving our call, they usually end up saying thank you. These things…
Ownership of the popular internet domain Gay.com has been transferred to the Los Angeles LGBT Center. The domain, estimated to be worth millions of dollars, was donated to the Center by VS Media and its flagship live cam site, Flirt4Free. “The Center provides services for more LGBT people than any other organization in the world,” said Flirt4Free Executive Vice President Brad Estes. “I’m very happy to announce that the future of Gay.com will go on within their extraordinary organization.” The company acquired the domain last year and wanted to transform it into something that would provide maximum support for the…
By Greg Hernandez Emotions were running deep in the courtyard of the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Village at Ed Gould Plaza the evening President Donald Trump tweeted his plans to ban transgender people from serving in the US military. “I’m just sickened by the whole thing,” said Deb Smith, the openly gay principal at Daniel Pearl Magnet School in Los Angeles. She was one of more than 100 people who attended the Center’s hastily-planned community gathering where people recorded video messages to transgender service members and wrote messages of opposition to the policy change to elected officials. “This is just…
By Greg Hernandez The plan by President Donald Trump to ban transgender people from all branches of the U.S. military is “very personal” to Los Angeles LGBT Center employee Rudy Akbarian. The 27 year old, who has served in the military for more than five years, got wind of Trump’s announcement shortly after arriving today at his job helping homeless LGBTQ youth find employment. “At first I didn’t believe it,” Akbarian told reporters at a press conference organized by the Center. “My heart dropped a little bit. It hurt. I cried. It was very personal.” In making his announcement via…
By Greg Hernandez President Donald Trump was blasted at a Los Angeles LGBT Center press conference today after announcing via Twitter that he wants to ban transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. “President Trump’s despicable reversal of the Pentagon’s policy allowing transgender people to openly serve in the military is beneath contempt,” CEO Lorri L. Jean told reporters gathered at the Center’s Village at Ed Gould Plaza.. “He dehumanizes the very people who have pledged to risk their lives for our country and the values our nation stands for: freedom, liberty and justice. Our transgender brothers and sisters…
By Greg Hernandez In her role as a Mexican Consulate Official, Dulce Flores never expected to be marching in an LGBT Pride event, so she was as surprised as those who saw her at L.A. Pride, marching with the unprecedented encouragement of the Mexican government. “It was one of the most favorite days of my life – definitely,” says Flores, 33, an out lesbian who has worked at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles for a decade. Flores has long been passionate about making the consulate a welcoming place for LGBT people. Just days before L.A. Pride weekend, she got…
By Greg Hernandez For the past three months, longtime Center volunteer Shawn Kravich has spent two mornings a week at the Mansfield Community Garden with groups of youth from the Center. “It’s the thing I look forward to most each week,” says Kravich, who has been gardening since he was a child. “We are able to give people a sense of pride of ownership over their specific plot. A lot of youth here have felt like they don’t have a sense of ownership.” The program Kravich has designed divides larger plots into smaller, individual spaces. This allows each person to…
Even where I’m from in Colombia, people know about the Center—the reach of our work is worldwide. While I was still coming out, I got a lot of support through the Center’s social groups, and the Center even helped me start a family. So I’ve wanted to work here for a while…to use my experience in public policy to support our community. Right now, the federal government is working to make things more difficult for immigrants, so it’s our responsibility to protect and defend our diverse community. I work to advance policies, locally and statewide, to protect LGBT immigrants—particularly undocumented…
Pride is a time to come together and celebrate the variety, vitality, and beauty of our community. It’s also a time to pay homage to our history. So much has changed and improved for LGBTQ people, but it’s also important to remember the fight. Many LGBTQ people still feel like outsiders in their day-today lives. When we started playing music in 1997, we were not under a lot of pressure to keep our sexuality a secret. Our music was pretty alternative and we spent the first five or six years fairly underground. We got to live as out artists and…