QueerCampus

Jim Parsons, best known for playing Sheldon Cooper on the TV show The Big Bang Theory, officially revealed that he’s gay and in a long-term relationship in a recent New York Times article. 

The article doesn’t focus on Parsons’s sexuality but on his up-and-coming theatre career. The “coming out” itself, if you could call it that, doesn’t happen until the third page of the online article:

“The Normal Heart” resonated with him on a few levels: Mr. Parsons is gay and in a 10-year relationship, and working with an ensemble again onstage was like nourishment, he said. As the production was ending last summer, he heard that the Roundabout Theater Companywas considering a revival of “Harvey” — initially with John C. Reilly under consideration for Elwood — and last November the play’s director, Scott Ellis, asked him and Ms. Hecht to do a private reading of the work in Los Angeles.

“Jim was solid in ‘The Normal Heart,’ ” Mr. Ellis said, “but his character didn’t really change in the journey of that play, so I wanted to see if Jim could take on a challenge and float a couple of feet off the ground, so to speak, in that magical way Elwood has. And in the reading he was just smart, smart, smart.”

Regardless of whether this was common knowledge in some circles or suspected in others, good for him for being able to talk about himself like this in a public forum. Woo!

AP | NEW YORK — President Barack Obama on Monday defended his view that gay couples should have the right to marry, saying that the country has never gone wrong when it “expanded rights and responsibilities to everybody.”

“That doesn’t weaken families. That strengthens families,” he told gay and lesbian supporters and others at a fundraiser hosted by singer Ricky Martin and the LGBT Leadership Council. “It’s the right thing to do.”

… “Young folks who marched and mobilized and stood up and sat in from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall they didn’t just do it for themselves, they did it for other people,” Obama said. “That’s how we achieved women’s rights, that’s how we achieved voting rights, that’s how we achieved workers’ rights, that’s how we achieved gay rights, that’s how we’ve made this union more perfect.”

Read more here.

Today we honor the birthday of Harvey Milk, one of our community’s most influential activists and most passionate leaders.

Milk stood up for equality for LGBT people when few had given it a passing thought. He organized thousands of people, many of whom had nowhere else to turn, around a common cause. He was one of many invaluable founders of the gay rights movement as we know it, and I am certain the world would be a different, more hurtful place had it not been for his courage and leadership.

At the site above, brought to you by the Harvey Milk Foundation, you can learn more about different remembrance events taking place across the country or brainstorm ways to get involved. Today’s an important day, and we should honor it.

What will you do?