gay youth

National Give OUT Day

May 9, 2013 By Brandon Leave a Comment

Today is National Give OUT day.

This is a national campaign designed to raise awareness and funds for local and national LGBT Organizations. As you know, here around the Shire we raise funds by donating 10% of the proceeds from our books to two organizations that work tirelessly to get homeless LGBT youth off the streets.

Both of these organizations are taking part in today’s event and you can donate to them at the links below. I would like to particularly emphasize that you take note of the Lost-n-Found page. On the right they have a donation list and it tells you exactly what just a few dollars can do and how much it can mean to a homeless kid.

Both organizations work toward the same goal, if you can, please give equally.

GLBT Advocacy & Youth and Lost-n-Found

Interview with Filmmaker Michael Morgenstern

May 7, 2013 By Brandon 1 Comment

Welcome Michael Morgenstern, Writer and Director of Shabbat Dinner, a short film about gay youth. You can see the film online. It is a pay-what-you-want with 10% of the profits going to the Ali Forney Center which combats LGBT youth homelessness. (See the trailer below.)

Brandon: I really liked your film. Tell us what motivated you to create it.

Michael: Well, I’d been working on a TV pilot for years about growing up gay in Los Angeles at age sixteen. In the nineties, it wasn’t what it’s like now. There wasn’t a world for us–everyone who was out was older. As I worked on it, I was continually re-motivated to work on the script by all the articles in 2011 newspapers about gay teen bullying and suicide. Every time I read one I was powerfully affected to do something to reach these kids.

Brandon: How hard was it to make?

Michael: Every part of making a film, even a short one, is a challenge, and we set out diligently to find actors, locations, and a crew. I looked for theater actors, reasoning it would be easier to find an established and talented actor who was successful on stage and looking to get into film than it would to find an already established film actor. I sat down with my friend Matt, who listened to the character descriptions I gave him and came up with ten actors for each character. Then I looked up all their agents and called them. About sixty to 100 calls later…no joke…we had most of our actors. [Read more…] about Interview with Filmmaker Michael Morgenstern

Rejecting Your LGBTQ Child by Sue Brown

April 29, 2013 By Brandon 15 Comments

This is a special guest post by my friend and fellow author, Sue Brown. She shares my passion, as you can see below. ~B.

Who am I talking to here? Probably not the people who should be reading this. So let me tell you about me. I grew up just outside of London, England. Nice area, nice parents, nice school. Everything just ‘nice’ and ‘normal’. And that’s it. Aside from my mum dying when I was eighteen there was nothing different about my life.

Scroll forward to today and I live about ten miles away, have two teenagers, and live in a pocket-sized house in a nice area. They go to nice schools and everything is just nice and normal.

What would happen if one day one of my kids told me they were gay or lesbian? What if they were transgender? Would it be nice and normal then? Yes, of course it would be. I don’t give a monkey’s who they are, who they love. It just doesn’t matter. I can’t emphasise that enough. I don’t care, and neither does their dad. [Read more…] about Rejecting Your LGBTQ Child by Sue Brown

Spotlight on an LGBT volunteer and why $12 is important

April 16, 2013 By Brandon 1 Comment

~ From James Robinson, Executive Director of GLBT Advocacy & Youth Services (reposted from Facebook.)

Today’s spotlight is on one of our volunteers … Ashley Ross is completing her Master’s in Social Work degree from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. Ashley first met with me about 9 months ago to discuss the possibility of an internship placement with the agency. I knew there was something special about Ashley when she showed up in December, a month early for her internship placement, and began volunteering. Since then I have learned some amazing things about Ashley and her dedication to social work and her support of equality and social justice. Ashley is our first intern from UA and I later found out she had worked for 2 years within her department to secure a placement with our agency. Last week as Ashley received the Margaret S. Odom Social Work Award from the Alabama Gerontological Society I learned that Ashley had based her submission for the award on an encounter she had with a gay man in a Senior Center program where she was working. This gay man shared his life story with Ashley and his story touched her heart. His decades of [Read more…] about Spotlight on an LGBT volunteer and why $12 is important

LGBT Music Monday – Sacha Sacket

February 25, 2013 By Brandon Leave a Comment

Sacha Sacket is a member of the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. He wrote this song in tribute to Jamey Rodemeyer, a 15 year old bisexual teen who took his own life. From Iran, and both bullied and harassed himself, Sacket’s song is a haunting tribute not only to Jamey but to all the youth we have lost.

#makealawforjamey

Amazon, Inclusivity and Suicide: Why I Bother To Write At All

February 18, 2013 By Brandon Leave a Comment

dave arney

As writers we sometimes find ourselves becoming confidants for readers. I know it has happened to me more than once. The reader connects and they want to share something with you; something they have never divulged to another soul, and then you scramble…wondering what words touched their heart enough for their confidence, and more importantly, you ask yourself what you can do to help. Friend and author, Dave Arney, who writes under the pen name Michael Moye is here to tell us about his book and his own recent experience. ~B.

I write primarily for the Young Adult/New Adult audience, which means I try to at least keep up communication with various members of that age group via Google+ and Twitter so I’m not horribly out of date about what’s going on.

On Valentine’s Day, I received a chat from a beta reader I’d met in a few communities on Google+. He’s extremely talented with editing, and actually made some great suggestions on cleaning up some rough patches, in addition to helping me gauge interest, hook, all the good stuff.

He told me he was going to kill himself. [Read more…] about Amazon, Inclusivity and Suicide: Why I Bother To Write At All