Diversity Rules Magazine

February 2016

Diversity Rules Magazine - _lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning_

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3 Diversity Rules Magazine February 2016 David-Elijah Nahmod is a film critic and re- porter in San Francis- co. His articles appear regularly in The Bay Area Reporter and SF Weekly. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter. David developed Post Traumatic Syndrome Disor- der (PTSD) after surviving gay conversion therapy as a child and has found that many in the LGBT community suffer from severe, often untreated emotional disorders due to the extreme anti-gay traumas they endured. This column chronicles his journey. Since the last edition of this column, I've been asked if I think LGBT advocacy groups like HRC, GLAAD and e Trevor Project are lying to the public about their goals and accomplishments. Yes, I absolutely believe that they are. For several years now I've been trying to get those organizations to take a stand against the almost continuous bullying and slandering of LGBT people which is being perpetrated not by anti-LGBT hate groups but by gay activists and bloggers. In various installments of this column and in other publications I've written about middle aged gay blog- gers who participate in the bullying of suicidal LGBT kids. I've verified and documented instances in which LGBT people were hospitalized in a suicidal state or needed police intervention as a direct result of threats and attacks from within the LGBT sphere. Perpetra- tors of this conduct include an openly gay convicted sex offender, along with individuals who have strong ties to organizations like Southern Poverty Law Center, GLAAD and HRC, a therapist at Queer Life Space (an LGBT counseling and therapy clinic in San Francisco) and at least one editor of an LGBT publication. None of these incidents are hearsay. I've personally contacted the press liaisons and executive directors of numerous LGBT advocacy groups and bully/suicide prevention organizations to show them actual threats that were emailed to a young lesbian suicide attempt survivor by a 47 year old gay man. I interviewed a transgender church pastor who needed to put their church under police surveillance after receiving threats of violence from within the LGBT sphere--that story included a screen grab of the threat in question. e Trevor Project, San Francisco Suicide Prevention and e American Foundation of Suicide Prevention have all assured me they will do nothing about this, as have social media platforms like Wordpress and Facebook. Numerous openly gay elected officials are also ignoring this information. On the rare occasions that I've gotten responses from gay activists regarding this issue, I was subjected to snarky references about mental illness, accusations of anti-gay bigotry, and no less than seven separate instances in which gay activists contacted my editors and attempted to get me fired from these publications. By their own admission, gay activists are behaving this way because they're gay, which they claim justifies ev- erything they do. Every week I hear from more and more LGBT people outside of activism's sphere who tell me of the abuse they've been subjected to from the community's largely self-appointed "leadership." A few of them were quot- ed in e Buck Doesn't Stop Anywhere Anymore, the last edition of this column. Now there's another who's come forward. Frank is an openly gay artist here in San Francisco. In an inflammatory blog posting which publishes his ac- tual home address, Frank was said to have anal warts, to be mentally ill, and to have died from AIDS--I'm not publishing Frank's full name out of respect for his privacy. Frank still lives at the address in the posting. Frank has repeatedly flagged said posting but Google refuses to delete it--apparently posting someone's home address without their permission isn't a viola- tion of community standards. Nahmod: Con't on page 13 If You Could Read My Mind "Frankly My Dear, They Don't Give a Damn" By David-Elijah Nahmod

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