Michael Sam talks racism, homophobiaM/B>
Onetime National Football League ( NFL ) player Michael Samthe first out gay man in the leaguerecently talked with Attitude magazine about racism and homophobia.
"It's terrible," he told the magazine, via The Advocate. "People have told me I'm not gay enough; people have told me I'm not Black enough. I don't know what that means. You want to be accepted by other people but you don't even accept someone just because of the color of their skin? I just don't understand that at all."
He also talked about coming out, saying that the positive messages definitely outweighed the negative ones, adding, "So many young people who were scared to tell their parents, they were athletes themselves: [they wrote that] you gave me the courage to come out myself. You know, it was amazing."
B. Proud book wins award
Photographer B. Proud recently won a gold medal in the category of Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Non-Fiction in the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards contest for her work First Comes Love: Portraits of Enduring LGBTQ Relationships.
The book is just one element of the First Comes Love Project, a traveling exhibition of photographs, love stories and video interviews documenting LGBTQ couples who have been together for 10, 20, 30, 40 and even 50+ years.
The silver medal went to two works: Perry Brass' The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love: Your Guide to Life, Happiness, and Emotional and Sexual Fulfillment in a Closed-Down World; and Finding Masculinity: Female to Male Transition in Adulthood, edited by Alexander Walker and Emmett J.P. Lundberg. The bronze medal went to Kristin Schreier Lyseggen's The Women of San Quentin: Soul Murder of Transgender Women in Male Prisons.
In the category of Gay/Lesbian/Bi/Trans Fiction, the medalists were Libby Ware's Lum: A Novel (gold), Susan Wittig Albert's Loving Eleanor (silver) and Rue's Finally My Favorite (bronze).