Listen here to today's Out FM.

We talk with Jesus Aguais, the executive director of Aid for AIDS, about how the earthquake and its aftermath have affected Haitians living with HIV/AIDS. Look here for a list of locations in New York to drop off desperately needed unused medications.

LGBT youth in San Francisco riff on Valentine's Day and the true design source of Valentine's hearts (hint: it's not phallic).

Queers for Economic Justice discuss how the financial crisis has affected low-income queers. Click here for more on Alyssa Schneebaum's groundbreaking research on poverty in LGB communities.

Finally, we honor pioneering, provocative feminist Mary Daly, who passed away on January 3rd.

Mary Daly, 1928-2010

The music in this show was "Mardi Gras in New Orleans" by Dejan's Olympia Brass Band, "Scandalize My Name" by Paul Robeson, "In the Sun" by She and Him, and "Boys from School" by Grizzly Bear.

Listen here to today's full show.

On today's Out FM, Trish Spoto and Naomi Brussel start the show by interviewing the always incisive Sharon Stapel (Executive Director of the Anti-Violence Project) about queer domestic violence (prompted by the murder of John Lea). Both Trish and Naomi bring their expertise as experienced social workers to the conversation about issues that many queer folks are hesitant to discuss openly. Listen to this segment separately here.

Finally, in the second half of the show, Naomi and Trish chat with Jamaican documentary filmmaker Selena Blake about her new film on homophobia in Jamaica. Listen to this segment separately here.

We also gave away a pair of free tickets to the hilarious show Avenue Q.

Listen here to a 24-minute interview with Jamaican documentary filmmaker Selena Blake. In 'Taboo: Yardies' she interviews both gay and straight Jamaicans in New York and Jamaica about the island nation's unapologetically hostile treatment of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Jamaicans.

Violence against gays in Jamaica prompted Human Rights Watch to issue the 2004 report "Hated to Death: Violence and Jamaica's HIV/AIDS Epidemic."

Listen to today's full, hour-long show here.

Writer, producer and director Selena Blake

John Lea was discovered brutally murdered in his Hells Kitchen apartment one January 21st. The police are investigating this as a domestic violence-related homicide.

Listen here to a 15-minute interview with Sharon Stapel, Executive Director of the Anti-Violence Project, discussing this case and domestic violence in LGBTQ relationships.

On Saturday, police in Vermont caught Justin Waller, the suspected  murderer. Waller was evidently down on his luck and living with Lea. Police say they were able to find Waller partially by tracking the use of the victim's credit cards. Waller had charged “a few hundred dollars” to one of Johns’s credit cards to hire a car to drive him to Vermont, according Sgt. Michael Hall of the Manchester Police Department.

Domestic violence is far more common than people realize in LGBTQ relationships and, at its most extreme, can end tragically in murder.  The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP) 2008 national report on domestic violence within the LGBTQ communities reported a 125% increase in domestic violence fatalities.  If you or anyone you know has ever felt unsafe in a relationship, AVP is here to support you and to safety plan with you.  Please call AVP today on their 24-hour bilingual (English/Spanish) Hotline at (212)714-1141.

Listen to today's full, hour-long show here.

GLOBE responded to its members' complaints of anti-trans discrimination while looking for jobs by conducting an innovative study to document employment discrimination against transfolks still happening despite nominal legal protections.

The results of this study are sobering, and in this excerpt from QEJ's Act Queer teleconference, GLOBE's Karina Claudio discusses how the project was conducted, the results of the study, and what policy responses GLOBE recommends.

Listen here to this six-minute piece.

GLOBE is the LGBT arm of Bushwick's Make the Road and one of the few groups founded by, led and constituted by low-income LGBT people of color organizing around public policy issues that have impact at the city-wide, state-wide and national level. Some resources from GLOBE (including a survey to help them collect more data before officially releasing their study):

• Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Safe Space Flyer

• GLOBE Services Flyer

• Transgender/Gender Nonconforming Employment Survey
  

Karina Claudio at a press conference

Karen Washington working a community garden

At a packed house at Bluestockings Bookstore last Wednesday, WBAI's Out-FM recorded a panel of openly queer farmers organized by Jonah Mossberg of the Queer Farmer Film Project. The panel featured queer urban farmers from NYC's Greenthumb program, Just Food’s Livestock Training Program, the NYC Community Gardens Coalition, and a woman from Darling Doe Farm in Saugerties in the Hudson Valley.

One of these panelists was Karen Washington, an African-American lesbian urban farmer who is co-founder of the La Familia Verde Community Gardens and board member of Just Food and the Mary Mitchell Family and Youth Center.She has been a driving force in community gardens in the East Tremont Area for over 20 years. Starting with the plot visible from her kitchen window on Prospect Avenue, she created a coalition of gardens throughout the Bronx in an effort to provide affordable, healthy food to the community.

Listen here to a 7-minute collection of her contributions to the panel, in which she connects the dots between urban agriculture and her perspective as a black queer person and discusses some of the challenges and successes she's had in her work, such as convincing upstate farmers to sell their goods at farmers' markets in the Bronx.

Betraying my queer Brooklyn bias yet again, this week I've been listening to the Ballet's great new album Bear Life. They're young, they're hot, they're smart, they're definitively the best sissy pop band that used to include art star Ginger Brooks Takahashi, of all spacetime. They're basically the Le Tigre of Metropolitan Bar.

One of the standout tracks is "Rough Trade," a bittersweet little song that should have been the soundtrack for the climax of James Franco's perfomance-art whatever it is he did on General Hospital, when he finally comes out of the closet and reveals that he and Liam Neeson are Hollywood's first openly gay B+-list power couple.

You can break my heart,

I won't be angry, I swear.

You can trash my art,

It wasn't going anywhere ...

Call me what you will

With the coldest shoulder,

I'll be here until

My career is over.

You can do anything you want.

You can have anything you want.

Listen here to one of the best tracks from their first album, "I Hate the War," which listeners called "amazing" and "the best war song you may not have heard."

-Chris

Listen here to a 10-minute excerpt of my interview with organic farmer Jonah Mossberg about his queer farmer film project. Jonah is a 24-year-old organic farmer based in Berkeley, California who is also transgender. He toured the country for a month last summer interviewing queer farmers from Brooklyn to Tennessee. In our conversation at a queer communal living space in southern Brooklyn last Saturday afternoon, we chatted about food justice, heteronormative family farmers, and stereotypes about organic farmers. Amazingly, neither of us cracked any Brokeback Mountain jokes.

Listen here to 8 minutes of extra footage, in which we discuss how he got interested in farming, wwoofing in Barcelona, some of the folks he met in different parts of the country, and what he plans to focus on as he develops the documentary.

Listen here to the 10-minute teaser from Jonah's documentary. Note: this sound was recorded at a panel of queer farmers at Bluestockings, and we're trying to get a better version of the audio. This version is still listenable, though.

Listen here to today's full show, which also includes an excerpt from Trans Organic Chemistry. In the next day we will also put up audio from his interviews with queer farmers.

Listen to the 58-minute piece here.

Join four trans people as they meet for the first time in a night of beautiful music, delicious food, fascinating stories and extravagant thought. Stories of gender insight and legal battles mingle with oxtails and Jerusalem artichokes in this hour-long gourmet radio program.

Jackie Martine, an accomplished cook

In remembrance of the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots that sparked the Queer Revolution, Out FM interviewed Stonewall veteran Martin Boyce. Martin was 21 years old on that fateful night in June of 1969, when the NYPD picked the wrong queens to mess with.

Listen here to Martin discussing how hard it was being queer in New York before Stonewall, and how that prepared them for the riots (don't miss his hilarious anecdote about a drag queen friend fighting back against a gang of Central Park youths who had popped the balloon she was holding). Martin also reminisces about going to Judy Garland's funeral himself and discusses whether or not the icon's death had anything to do with the Stonewall Riots.

Listen here to Brad Taylor interview Martin about his first-hand memory of the details of the first stage of the riots, from when the police raided the bar to the rioters spontaneously blockading the police inside the bar.

Listen here to a teaser from an upcoming PBS documentary about the Riots. Martin and all the other surviving veterans of the Riots piece together the events of that momentous night.

Martin Boyce is now a chef still living in New York. When asked by Out FM whether being a veteran of the Riots improved his dating life with younger gays who idolize those trailblazers, he squealed, "I wish!"

Listen to today's show here.

After that piece, our sister station IMRU profiles the recently revived off-Broadway hit Avenue Q.

Finally, we honor the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots by interviewing the hilarious and spunky Stonewall veteran Martin Boyce, who was hanging out at his favorite bar that steamy night in June of 1969, when the police picked the wrong queens to mess with.

We also gave away a pair of free tickets to Zero Hour, Jim Brochu's one-man play about the life and career of the late, great actor-singer-painter Zero Mostel (directed by the legendary Piper Laurie).

The music in today's show was "I Hate the War" by Brooklyn-based queertet The Ballet, "My Favorite Things" by out artist Xavier, and "Uptight (Everything's Alright)" by out legend Dusty Springfield.

Listen to the broadcast segment here.

Members of Sex Workers Action New York marched at Pride 2009.

December 17th was the 7th Annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. Originally conceived by Dr. Annie Sprinkle and started by the Sex Workers Outreach Project USA as a memorial and vigil for the victims of the Green River Killer in Seattle, Washington, this event now calls attention to hate crimes committed against sex workers all over the globe, from Montreal to Sydney. 

According to the Paulo Longo Research Initiative (a new policy institute focusing on international research on sex workers),

• USAID research conducted in 2006 in Cambodia found that of the female and transgender sex workers surveyed approximately half were beaten by police; about a third were gang-raped by police and about three-quarters were gang-raped by other men during the past year.
• A groundbreaking study of sex workers in Central and Eastern Europe revealed that police in the region routinely physically and sexually abuse sex workers, that they use violence and threats of violence or arrest to extort money or sex from sex workers, and that they are able to commit such abuses with impunity.
  
• The World Health Organisation has recognised clear links between violence and sex workers' vulnerability to HIV, and recently both Ban Ki Moon, UN Secretary-General, and Michel Sidibé, UNAIDS Executive Director, have recommended that laws that punish sex workers be repealed in the light of evidence that they increase HIV vulnerability.

In New York, sex worker activists, sex worker non-activists, and their allies met last Thursday at the Metropolitan Community Church in Chelsea to raise awareness about violence here and abroad and to advocate for the legalization of sex work and protection of sex workers.

A candlelight vigil was held and the names were read of the 70 sex workers in the U.S. whose murders were documented in the past year. As a representative from Sex Workers Action New York (SWANK) said, "because sex workers' experiences of violence are often silenced, we know that there are many more people who passed on in 2009 than we are naming tonight. May their spirits be at peace and may we honor their lives as we work together to end violence against sex workers."

Names of murdered sex workers were read at a candlelight vigil.