Oasis and OutProud have always been sister sites, and after 16 years of providing services to LGBT youth, OutProud shut down recently (and is forwarding its web traffic here).
OutProud was the first organization in 1993 to provide outreach to queer youth on a national basis -- first on AOL and then over the Internet.
We will be adding more resources here in the future, but for now, feel free to join Oasis and start making friends with other LGBT* youth from around the world.
By Jeff Walsh
"The New Twenty" is a movie about a group of college friends who live in New York City. When the movie starts, we see them posing for a picture on their graduation day from college. After that we jump ahead a few years and see how they are growing up and apart.
There are two gay guys in the group of friends. One is an overweight guy who continually gets rejected on Internet sex sites. And the other is an Asian guy who starts falling in love with someone HIV positive. Most of the story revolves around the one friend who is starting a business and how that affects things.
For me, the movie just never grabbed me and made me interested in any of the characters, plots, or subplots. So, it wasn't that the movie was bad, inasmuch as it was just… there.
By Jeff Walsh
"Finding Me" is an interesting movie to watch, because most of the time I watched it, my verbtaim thoughts were soon repeated back to me. The main character of the movie, Faybien, starts off as an aimless guy who has no academic interests or a good job. But, we see him phone a friend when he sees Lonnie, a hot guy that often appears at his bus stop. In the call, he is excited to see the guy there again and decides he needs to finally say hi.
It's only after that point that the character keeps going in circles, where he keep deciding what he wants in life. But that's where it got amusing, because when the character would frustrate me and I'd think 'What is this kid's problem?', one of the characters in the movie would say 'What's your problem?' Later, I'd think, he needs to do something already and stop thinking everything through so much. Then a character would say 'You need to just go for it.'
So, on one hand, I guess I really understood how taxing it is to be Faybien's friend, but I don't think that was the point of the movie, which is really about him getting over his homophobic father, his dead mother, and other issues, and finally decide how he wants to live his life. But since you sort of know it's the only clear path, and the one he's likely to take before the credits roll, it takes him a long time getting there.
I wrote a little thing about seing my name on the side under "new users" and thinking, "hey, I'm not a new user! I've been around forever..."
But then it disappeared... obviously, despite extensive LJing, I haven't got this blog thing down... oh well.
The new site looks fantabulous, thanks to all the people who put it up, esp. Mama Jeff and Adrian. Much queer love to everyone.
here i am having this sore throat...............went shopping today.....umm, i really need a pair of jeans...can't find a watch i like.......and i'm still coughing from i dunno what
maybe i should turn in early, afterall i promised to have breakfast wif some frens.....then again, when have i ever been on time, lol.
anyway, dun trust mp3 editing programmes. they almost never work....
that some people just have toooooooo much fucking time.
I am waiting anxiously for latest toy to arrive. ... mwahahaha.
Pretty soon I'll have my own arcade cabinet in my living room. Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, etc etc. mmm.. can't wait.
Over the last few years, I've been trying to assert my identity and I've run into some problems as a gay black male. I don't seem to exist. At least not in the sense of having a visible and accessible community to fall back on. During the entirety of my coming out and my identity development process I've understood this to en extend but still tried to explore the communities open to me. At the time that I was coming out this meant exploring gayness and getting a feeling for gay culture. I failed at joining some type of larger gay community in high school or finding a group with any strong gay identity (except for this one youth center) and I had no idea how to incorporate my gayness and blackness.
Have you ever gotten that one phone call where everything stops and all u can hear is your heart racing and the other person
As I write these words I am seething towards my parents.
I don't even like that word for them.
Granted there are worse.
However, my mother's control issues piss me off to no end.
I'm 18 years of age. I can legally vote, smoke, buy porn and rent a hotel room.
I cannot, however, take walks at night. Go anywhere alone. Use public transit. She expects the school to call if I don't show up to my 7:00 AM class (when school starts ay 8:00) because I might have died on the way there.
