By Reid Nakamura Liberation Coffee House celebrated its second anniversary earlier this month with a special event inviting customers to experience the café’s community-focused offerings after years of pandemic restrictions. Located at the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Anita May Rosenstein Campus, the 1,600-square-foot café first opened its doors in August 2020 with plenty of excitement from the community but few opportunities to utilize the space as it was originally intended. Two years later, the plastic partitions separating employee and customer have come down and visitors no longer have to take their food to-go. “It’s been a long two years with…
Author: Reid Nakamura
By Reid Nakamura Trying to distill the journey of trans and non-binary people into a single three-act show is, to put it simply, impossible. But that’s exactly what the Trans Chorus of Los Angeles plans to do with its upcoming show, VOICES: The Trans Journey in III Acts. Produced by the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s Lily Tomlin/Jane Wagner Cultural Arts Center, VOICES is the first event of the Tomlin/Wagner Center’s fall 2022 season and the first under the leadership of new its new artistic director. Through a mix of songs, poetry, and spoken word, the show aims to let the audience…
By Dan Allen As a new school year dawns, the Los Angeles LGBT Center’s OUT for Safe Schools (OFSS) program continues to provide vital assistance to LGBTQ+ students in the greater Los Angeles area and in school districts across the nation at a time when the rights of LGBTQ+ youth are being openly and aggressively attacked. “The war against LGBTQ+ equality is currently being fought in the classrooms, bathrooms, and sports fields of our schools across the nation,” says Center CEO Joe Hollendoner. “OUT for Safe Schools provides essential support to teachers, students, and parents who are seeking to protect…
By Reid Nakamura The goal for the Los Angeles LGBT Center is to provide “sex-positive, non-judgmental, sensitive health care” for those who need it most, said James Bell, medical director of the Center’s Sexual Health Education Program. And with that reasoning in mind, the Center has been trying to provide human monkeypox (hMPXV) vaccines to the most at-risk communities, which includes adult film actors. On Friday, Aug. 5, Center WeHo partnered with the Performer Availability Screening Service (PASS), which works to promote health and testing in the sex work industry, to distribute nearly 70 doses of the Jynneos vaccine. “We…
By Joe Hollendoner The Los Angeles LGBT Center demands that Los Angeles County declare human monkeypox (hMPXV) a public health emergency. I sent Dr. Barbara Ferrer, the director of the County Department of Public Health, and the L.A. County Board of Supervisors a letter last week requesting they act with urgency to further mobilize local resources and hold the federal government accountable for addressing this crisis. This follows the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring human monkeypox a global health emergency on June 23 and both San Francisco and the state of New York declaring the same in their respective jurisdictions…
By Reid Nakamura As the human monkeypox (hMPXV) outbreak continues to spread in L.A. County, concerned residents at a town hall on Wednesday, July 27, called on public health officials to respond more aggressively to the crisis, demanding that more be done to protect the most vulnerable members of our community. Hosted by the Los Angeles Blade in partnership with the Los Angeles LGBT Center and other community partners, the town hall featured a range of panelists, including representatives from the L.A. County Department of Public Health (DPH), a recently recovered hMPXV patient, LGBT community clinic representatives, and prevention advocates.…