Periodically we’ll feature one of our vendors here to let our readers know about some great people who can help you plan the perfect wedding.
Cliff Cottage Inn has been performing commitment ceremonies and weddings for couples of all persuasions…both gay, straight and otherwise… since 1992 and all are still happily married!
See the Cliff Cottage Expanded Listing on Purple Unions Here
Gay Friendly Wedding Vendors in Arkansas
Periodically we’ll feature one of our vendors here to let our readers know about some great people who can help you plan the perfect wedding.
Don’t settle for boring straight wedding photography. (pun intended 🙂 I’ve been shooting events for over twenty years, but like most other photographers no doubt, same sex weddings have always been a relatively small part of my business. It certainly hasn’t been for lack of interest on my part. As a gay male and photographer in New York City, I’m absolutely thrilled about the legalization of gay marriage in New York, and look forward to photographing lots of NY same sex weddings for couples who have been waiting a long time for this to come about.
See the David Gordon Photography Expanded Listing on Purple Unions Here
Gay Friendly Wedding Vendors in New York
Today when I awoke here in California my feed was abuzz with disturbing pictures and articles of (purportedly) gay men being thrown from a rooftop by ISIS, which appears to have taken place in Mosul. The internet is aflame right now with pictures of ISIS, displaying these horrors for the world to see and of course to share. And there are more pictures showing contorted bloody bodies on the ground, and others depicting the shooting of people on crucifixes, beheading, stoning and more and more and yes it is horrific.
Pictorial accounts of the murders were apparently disseminated on Twitter by Isis, and it was easy to find. It did not take long for the West to jump to their call. Almost every LGBT and progressive outlet will undoubtedly continue to do their bidding. Are we spreading the intended fear? Or will we simply be angry! What do we do – do we succumb, do we remain silent and is there a middle road?
This is indeed a predicament – one in which I find myself caught too. There is fine balance and I do not now how to play it. On the one hand compelled as we are to spread news and create awareness, we do their bidding, while we inflame outrage- which is precisely what they want – and at the same time outraged we should be.
Authored By Melanie Nathan – See the Full Story at O-blog-dee-o-blog-da
This just in from The New York Times:
The Food and Drug Administration announced on Tuesday that it would scrap a decades-old lifetime prohibition on blood donation by gay and bisexual men, a change that experts said was long overdue and could lift the annual blood supply by as much as 4 percent. The F.D.A. enacted the ban in 1983, early in the AIDS epidemic. At the time, little was known about the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes the disease, and there was no quick test to determine whether somebody had it. But science and the understanding of H.I.V. in particular has advanced in the intervening decades, and on Tuesday the F.D.A. acknowledged as much, lifting the lifetime ban but keeping in place a more modest block on donations by men who have had sex with other men in the last 12 months. In a statement, the agency said it had carefully examined and considered the scientific evidence before changing the policy. It said it intended to issue a draft guidance detailing the change in 2015.
So you’ll still have to wait 12 months without having sex to donate. But it’s a step in the right direction.
A new study from Denmark has a surprising finding – not that married gay men longer – we’ve long known that married couples tend to have longer lives – but that married lesbians don’t. Queerty has the details:
A study published in The International Journal of Epidemiology claims the death rate among Danish men in same-sex partnerships has dropped significantly since the 1989, when Denmark became the first country in the world to legally recognize same-sex partnerships… Unfortunately, this marriage perk doesn’t seem to extend to women in same-sex partnerships–their death rate has actually increased in the last decade. “Lesbians may constitute a largely unnoticed high-risk population for suicide and breast cancer, so our findings call for efforts to identify the underlying factors responsible and ensure access to basic health care in this population,” says researcher Morten Frisch.
On the bright side, women usually outlive men, even if marriage doesn’t make that life even longer.
India, which has been a popular destination for gay would-be parents seeking surrogacy services, will be so no more, with new regulations barring foreign same-sex couples and single people from entering into surrogacy arrangements there.
The new rules, posted on the Indian Home Ministry’s website, “say foreign couples seeking to enter into a surrogacy arrangement in India must be a ‘man and woman [who] are duly married and the marriage should be sustained at least two years,'” Agence France-Presse reports. Some proponents of the move said they were concerned about exploitation of impoverished young Indian women by affluent foreigners. India legalized commercial surrogacy in 2002.
Authored By Trudy Ring – See the Full Story at The Advocate
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A court in Beijing has proposed that legislation should be drafted to allow marriages to be annulled if a person discovers that their spouse is gay.
The First Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing published a report last week which argued that it should be possible for people who have unwittingly married gay partners to file for an annulment instead of a divorce.
The report notes that divorce still carries a social stigma in parts of China and that women, in particular, come out of divorce situations unfavourably. An annulment would mean that the legal status of both spouses would revert back to ‘single’ rather than ‘divorced’.
Authored By Corinne Pinfold – See the Full Story at Pink News
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A university professor in China has estimated that 16 million women in the world’s most populous country are married to gays.
Professor Zhang Bei-chuan of Qingdao University says the huge number of women – equivalent to the population of the Netherlands – who have tied the knot with gay men are struggling to cope.
Speaking to state-run China Daily, the academic said as many as 90% of gay Chinese men marry to conform with social norms.
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A new study has found that gay men who live in states that don’t treat them like second-class citizens are–imagine this!–happier and healthier!
After studying gay men in Massachusetts, the American Journal of Public Health reports that visits to health clinics dropped significantly–regardless of relationship status–since marriage equality became law.
Researchers studied 1,211 gay men at a particular MA clinic one year before marriage equality and one year after. Following the opening of marriage rights to same-sex couples, researchers say gay men experienced a 13 percent drop in clinic visits, as well as a decrease in blood pressure, depression and stress-related illnesses.
Click here for gay wedding resources.
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Men have to be dragged kicking and screaming to the altar – whether they’re straight or gay. Same-sex couples can begin applying for New York marriage licenses today, but don’t expect to see many gay grooms at City Hall on July 25, when they can actually start tying the knot.
That’s because in the states that have sanctioned same-sex nuptials to date, lesbians have been marrying in much greater numbers than gay men. In Connecticut, for example, 3,252 lesbian couples have wed since 2008, when same-sex marriage was legalized, compared with just 2,053 gay guys.
“This is the way men and women have been socialized from the time we’re born,” said Stephanie Coontz, who teaches family studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. “‘Go out, don’t commit too early’ . . . It’s the message all men receive.”
Click here for gay marriage resources in New York.
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I have a story in this new anthology, coming out on 6/26/16 - Marriage Equality Day!
Four Wedding Stories by Gay, Married Authors.
