With the end of each trip that I take, as I leave the revolving doors of Omaha’s Eppley Airfield, my body is instantly submerged either in the damp heat of the Heartland’s summer or the intense breeze of our unforgiving winters. I can’t say that I particularly care for the average weather that we endure, but it is something that reminds me I am home.

Transgender Day of Remembrance

November is a month filled with many special days; Election Day, Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Hanukkah begins.  There is one day that I would like for all of us to stop and give thought to.

In so many organizations we use the “alphabet soup” to describe short cuts of what we do.  The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender community is no different.  Are we the GLBT community or the GLBTQQA… community?  The list really could go on.

Cyber-security, web defacement and you

How an article about TDoR became an article about internet security:

November 20th is the Transgender Day of Remembrance. On this day the trans community memorializes all of those killed by hate crimes and hatred of Transgender, Transsexual, and other gender variant individuals. I have been involved in planning public vigils for TDoR for the last four years or so and I even took heat from good ole Bob VanderPlaats. My angry response to Mr. VanderPlaats "You can't have my pain" was the first article I published in the Accessline.

Dr. Olson,

With so much more in the media about gay men and women, isn’t it much easier to come out now than it was in the past?

The simple answer is “No,” but it’s more complicated than that.  From the perspective of society as a whole, it may be easier, but on an individual basis it is not.  While it is true that we magnify potential losses and minimize potential gains, the reality is that some people feel they risk losing too much by coming out.

The God’s Truth

I took a trip to Crazyland the other day.

You guessed it: I visited Bob Vander Plaats’ The FAMiLY Leader website and viewed a video on why Iowa Supreme Court Justice David Wiggins should be fired a few days from now.

It was an excursion into complete fantasy.

Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls discusses her connection to Iowa, how she and Amy Ray collaborate, being out in the music industry, their Grammy nominations, and three decades of performing.

Decades into their career, the Indigo Girls still amaze with their ability to grow and thrive no matter what the state of the music industry is at any given point. Saliers and Ray began performing together in high school, transferred their honest, urgent performing style onto the stages of countless small clubs, then saw their public profile take off with the 1989 release of their self-titled breakthrough (an album that included the first hit, “Closer To Fine,” and went on to win Best Contemporary Folk Recording at the 1990 Grammys).

The Election as a Moral Compass

In 2004 I was still struggling with what it meant to be gay. As with many gays I suffered bouts of severe depression and self-loathing. My father disapproved of my sexual orientation, and I felt paralyzing anxiety when I ventured into a gay bar. In the midst of this, I had to watch the Republican Party use homophobia to get an unpopular president reelected. State after state passed constitutional amendments to ban gay marriage, often with huge popular margins. Evangelical Christians mobilized in droves to get out the vote to oppose the gay menace. It was all part of an intentional strategy devised by Karl Rove and his talented assistant Ken Mehlman, a strategy that echoed Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” in 1968.