Out & About Festiv a l

is a longtime LGBTQ rights and Democratic Party activist. He writes regularly for the Blade.

Do we turn it off, laugh, cry, or rail at the TV when Trump is on?

CNN’s town hall showcases more lies, insults

I watched the CNN Trump town hall along with 3.3 million other Americans. My intention was to tune in for the first few minutes, but it was like watching a train wreck, you couldn’t turn away. The man is clearly certifiable. He looked old and puffy in his closeups, and you could have played some old video clips of him and gotten the same thing. I can just imagine some of his campaign team thinking: We got him the chance to expand his audience, he just can’t do it. He played to his base.

The hour began with him doubling down on his claim the 2020 election was rigged. It was stolen from him. Clearly, he will never let go of this. Kaitlin Collins, CNN host, corrected him, all but calling him a liar. She kept trying to do that with every lie he told, which was about every time he opened his mouth. But it was a losing cause, as he just railed over her. At one point calling her a ‘nasty woman.’

On the issue of abortion, based on his answer or non-answer, his team apparently urged him to take a middle-of-the-road stance. But he wouldn’t. He thumped his chest and said over and over, “I overturned Roe v. Wade; I did what no president in 50 years could do.” Then in what seemed an olive branch to his handlers, he refused to say whether he would sign a bill to ban abortion nationally if he were president and it reached his desk. Then again repeated he personally overturned Roe v. Wade.

Asked about Ukraine, and whether he would continue to send weapons, he wouldn’t answer. He simply used the old lines he used when talking about NATO; the Europeans aren’t paying enough, and we are paying too much. When asked if he still believed what he said about Putin, having called him brilliant, he demurred, said Putin may have made a mistake with the invasion. Then said had he been president it wouldn’t have happened, and went on to claim he would end the war in 24 hours. Never saying how, or whose side he’s on.

On whether he thought his call to Georgia asking for the 11,780 votes was OK, he said it was perfect, they owed him those votes.

Trump called an African-American police officer who protected the Congress against his supporters, a thug. He said he would pardon those peace-loving people who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He called everyone, including Nancy Pelosi and President Biden, ‘stupid’ over and over. When asked about the recent verdict against him for sexual assault and demeaning language, he doubled down saying “I don’t know that woman and she is a whack job,” using language he was just convicted of. When asked about the top secret documents found at Mar-a-Lago he admitted he took them intentionally, saying they were his to take. When asked if he showed them to anyone, he said he couldn’t remember. About the only people who may have gotten something out of this display of madness, were the lawyers trying to convict him of crimes. He admitted some of them, and perpetrated new ones, in his hour on air.

It was sad watching the audience reaction to this unhinged man. They laughed when he claimed it was OK for stars to molest women, and when he called E. Jean Carroll a name. They applauded his lying, clearly agreeing the election was rigged. What does this say about them? Who are these people with no connection to the truth? Women in the audience who can laugh at other women being molested.

The debate will go on as to who the 3.3 million watching were. Were they like me, who sees this insane man and recommits to doing everything I can to keep him from being president? Or were they his supporters who think he is rational and will vote for him again? Was anyone’s mind changed? Was there one Trump 2020 voter watching the train wreck thinking ‘enough is enough, I will not vote for him again?’ This was billed as the first town hall in the New Hampshire Republican primary. Will CNN treat us to town halls with every Republican that announces? Will the audiences be the same? Who will watch?

Then there is the unanswered question, will President Biden participate in a Democratic New Hampshire primary if it occurs before the DNC says it should? So much more to come!

The Department of Energy and Environment is developing a restoration plan for the Anacostia River Corridor to improve water quality and habitat, increase equitable access to recreational activities, and enhance resiliency to climate change.

Join us for an interactive online community meeting!

Thursday, June 8th | 6:30 pm

Register today at: arcrp.eventbrite.com

For more info & to provide feedback: bit.ly/AnacostiaRiverSurvey

For about a decade, LESLIE ROBINSON wrote a humor column called ‘General Gayety’ for LGBTQ publications and she now blogs at www.generalgayety.com.

Telling the world about my mental disorders

Confessing queerness a breeze compared to revealing psychological struggles

Over the years, coming out as a lesbian hasn’t been that hard for me—because I was always too busy hiding something else.

Confessing queerness can be a breeze compared to revealing mental illness.

But I decline to play this game of hide-the-worse-stigma any longer. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and a fi tting time for me to acknowledge I’m now so out as a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and hoarding disorder (HD) that my closet is as empty as Rep. George Santos’ conscience.

Which is a weird sensation, after decades of keeping mostly mum about my conditions. Occasionally I ask myself whether there isn’t something else I’m still hiding, something embarrassing nestled among the hangers and dust bunnies.

Nope, there’s nothing. But it’s not a surprise I ask. I’m checking, which is the primary manifestation of my OCD. I can doubt anything: whether I locked my car door, or spelled a name in a story correctly, or said something stupid in public. This results in a need, a compulsion, to check once, twice, 50 times.

OCD is known as the Doubting Disease. HD used to be considered part of OCD, but is now offi cially its own condition, the big show-off. As a hoarder, I fi nd it incredibly hard to part with a lot of items. I’m especially compelled to keep old letters, books, newspapers. I’m the princess of paper, the sultan of stuff, the collector of crap.

These two disorders, combined with depression, made for rough decades. My journalism career fi zzled; my personal life was a study in frustration. I reached a point where I wanted to explain to my family and friends why I lived a stagnant existence, and the only way I knew to do that was to write a memoir about living under the thumb of OCD and HD.

I’m sure entire planets were created in the time it took me to get the book done. What was I thinking? I’d set myself a Catch-22 of a situation: trying to write about how hard it is for me to write. I must’ve been crazy.

Oh, right.

Anyway, I laid out in print the baffl ing, humiliating nature of these illnesses as honestly as I could. Sometimes the level of vulnerability scared me, but I fi gured there was no point in doing this halfway. I hurled open the closet door, and if it swung back and conked me on the schnoz, so be it.

I still have moments where I can’t believe I exposed myself to that extent, but in the main I feel unburdened. No more secrets. No more hiding my truth. No more cringing with shame over a part of me that I didn’t choose. Sound familiar?

I wish I didn’t have so much LGBTQ company where mental illness is concerned. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults are more than twice as likely as straight adults to have a mental health condition. Transgender folks are almost four times as likely as cisgender folks to have a mental health condition.

If you didn’t suffer from depression before, reading these NAMI statistics will do the job.

But there’s hope in my story. Now that I’ve drop-kicked denial and faced my conditions, and now that I’ve gone extraordinarily public about them, I’m more willing and able to battle them. Coming out helped shed the stigma.

When May rolls into June, Mental Health Awareness Month rolls into Pride month. The two are linked by more than the calendar. Both aim to make the world a safer place for telling the truth.

I think July is Disability Pride Month. But I’m not sure. Let me check six or seven times.