Underlying Rights

To mark the arrival of her newest memoir When We Were Outlaws, storied lesbian writer and activist Jeanne Cordova chatted with Windy City Times reporter Sarah Toce about some of the book’s highlights. What a long and remarkable life’s journey it has been.

On the journalism front, it all started in 1971 with the launch of groundbreaking LA magazine The Lesbian Tide. Most of the time, the publication was powered by donated, like-minded labor. During this time, Cordova also became the human-rights editor at progressive newspaper the LA Free Press:

“I was first hired as The Freep’s token ‘Chicana, feminist, lesbian’ columnist. My weekly essays became know as ‘that dyke column’ by the largely straight readership, but it got people listening to my voice as I covered the [1973] Battle of the Sexes, the famous tennis match between female (and closeted lesbian) tennis player Billie Jean King and male tennis star, Charlie Riggs,” said Cordova.

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

This weekend’s 60 Minutes looks like it’s going to be a good one. Byron Pitts reports on the story of  20-year-old Times-Tribune reporter Adam Sulfridge, who was forced to arm himself while working his beat after receiving death threats from the corrupt Sheriff Lawrence Hodge. His editor was packing too.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency almost killed a UC San Diego college student by abandoning him in a prison cell for 5 days without food or water.

Daniel Chong was imprisoned on April 21 when DEA agents raided the home of a friend he was visiting. Chong was detained for questioning but not arrested, not charged with a crime, and should have been released. Instead, agents locked him in a cell and forgot all about him.

Chong was forced to drink his own urine to survive. There were no restroom facilities in the 5-by-10-foot cell, but oddly enough, there was methamphetamine, which agents admit was left there accidentally. Chong descended into psychosis, eating glass from his own broken eyeglasses. When he was finally discovered, he was suffering severe dehydration, a perforated esophagus and kidney failure.

The DEA only issued an apology to Chong today, two full days after the press began reporting on the incident, and a week after he was discovered near death in his cell.

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Before flying to Los Angeles this weekend with her partner and four children to attend the 2012 GLAAD Media Awards, Ohio mom Jennifer Tyrrell had never boarded a commercial airliner. Her appearance Saturday night at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel led to eight minutes of the best kind of teary awards speechifying – a dedicated mom thanking GLAAD for their support of her efforts to right a Boy Scouts of America wrong.

FishbowlLA’s favorite part the Tyrrell speech comes at around the seven-minute mark. That’s when she urged people in the audience to sign her change.org petition, which asks that she be reinstated as a Boy Scout den mother in Bridgeport:

“I’m going to ask each of you right now to take your phone, go to change.org/scouts. It will take you right to the petition. Go ahead, everyone. Take out your phone. It’s OK… Then share it with everyone you know. Together, we can make a difference.”

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Although the latest ratings have KFI AM 640 awash in market-dominating numbers, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) is not giving up its fight against weekday personalities Rush Limbaugh, John Kobylt and Ken Chiampou.

In a recent telephone interview with rbr.com, organization president Alex Nogales called once more for Clear Channel to sack the hosts of “The John and Ken Show.” The NHMC has also shared a new video to support its ongoing efforts:

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When Bill Boyarsky worked for the LA Times, he covered both the riots sparked by Rodney King and the trial of O.J. Simpson. In his latest column for truthdig.com, he considers the Trayvon Martin shooting and recent hate crimes in Tulsa, Oklahoma within the 20th anniversary context of the 1992 riots.

His conclusions are not happy ones. Although he acknowledges there are differences between the decades-separated incidents, he argues that the U.S. racial divide remains as bad as ever. Boyarsky quotes some interesting data from Rand, Gallup and Loyola Marymount, while also pointing the finger at a layer that was absent during his LA Times days:

We thought communications were fast, but compared with today, news traveled slowly and rabble-rousing nuts didn’t have the Internet to spew their venom… With racist gunslingers inspired by their Facebook and Twitter “friends,” emboldened by permissive gun laws and hating the increasing racial diversity of America, nothing has changed.

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eXiled editor Yasha Levine still has a host of legal woes hanging over his head from being arrested while covering last November’s LAPD crackdown of OccupyLA. Turns out, those are the least of his worries at the moment. During his two-day stay in Los Angeles Metro Jail, Levine says he contracted a wicked case of scabies.

Until a few days ago, I thought my scabies was just a gnarly poison oak rash that I had picked up in the Santa Monica mountains after losing the trail and having to cut through the overgrown backyards of multimillion dollar mansions. For weeks the rash kept getting worse and worse, and I finally went to a doctor to get some relief. But it turned out that poison oak was the least of my worries.

“You have scabies,” said the doc, sucking in his breath through his teeth and shaking his head. It took him no more than 30 seconds to diagnose my condition. “The track marks are a dead giveaway,” he said, and pointed out a couple of elongated welts about a half-inch long creeping up the side of my right ring finger. These “tracks marks” were actually burrows made by  mother-parasites as they tunneled right below the surface of my skin and laid eggs in the process. I had dozens of similar track marks of all shapes and sizes on both hands. As I stared at my hands in disgust, the doc moved to the sink and violently scrubbed his hands with medical soap. Our contact was minimal, but he wasn’t taking any chances…

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Expect to hear a lot more about this story, first reported by CBS LA and picked up today under a clever headline by the Pasadena Star-News.

In the face of bullying at his San Gabriel elementary school, Gerry Orz – the 10-year-old son of lesbian parents – decided to fight back by means of a two-part film about his experiences. He’s also spearheading a national anti-bullying day for December 12, 2012.

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In the past week, not one but two writers, Robert Weissberg and John Derbyshire, were fired from the conservative magazine National Review for being overtly racist. The former was canned for participating in a white supremacist conference in Tennessee, while the latter got axed for penning a column that, among other choice nuggets of wisdom, advised white young adults, “If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date.”

But are they? Marketwatch, owned by Dow Jones, employs not one, but two contributors to the white nationalist site VDare. And neither seems to be in danger of losing their jobs. The first is Peter Brimelow, the editor of VDare who we’ve written about on this site before. Brimelow was fired from the NR in 1998 for his racist views. But that didn’t stop him from becoming a financial correspondent for Marketwatch–all-the-while he continuing his white nationalist propaganda on VDare.

Brimelow isn’t the only VDare contributor writing for Marketwatch. He’s joined by economic consultant Edwin Rubenstein, who also moonlights as an analyst for the National Policy Institute–an organization that aspires to “elevate the consciousness of whites, ensure our biological and cultural continuity, and protect our civil rights.”

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You’d think it would be tough for anyone to find fault with a celebrity’s effort to fight a horrific case of anti-Semitism. You’d be wrong. That’s exactly what happened to Jon Lovitz after he tweeted a pic of the three 15-year-old girls who defaced the home of a Jewish friend in Northridge with feces and swastikas. Lovitz sent a message with his pic.

“The 3 girls who are bullying my friend’s daughter. They want to be known. Let them be famous as Jew haters. Pls RT.”

The girls were subsequently expelled from school. Kudos to Lovitz for bringing some accountability to a terrible crime, right? Not according to Above the Law associate editor Chris Danzig.

Seriously, dude?

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