unfortunately there is too much of a ring of truth to it but meanwhile really going after us the attorney general they have talked about him a lot but this weight he says he actually will enforce the law in our favor headlines we told you about the bullied gay bronx teen abel's the de niro who was accused of killing his tormentor in class well he got his charges reduced this week to manslaughter from two andy has been johnny on the spot on this case and we'll give you all the details including his interview with abel sedating you know and we know with all the press conference held by gay chechen man who came out publicly about the way he was kidnapped and tortured by his government doctors are going to be required to ask a don't patients about their sexual one who really brought to our attention just how evil the koch brothers are the depths of their anger all reporter the koch brothers are the ones who run the country if you hadn't noticed they really do i mean they run your state legislatures they run the congress isn't anything they don't run they're trying to take over in the next midterm as mike pence by the way i think this is the connection here mike pence is the candidate that the koch brothers wanted to win the presidency but then he and he was going to run but then he didn't run because he made such a hash of his job as governor of indiana that he couldn't even get reelected as governor of indiana because of the way he handled the gay things so ineptly and that he was really his nomination as vice president was the price that trump pay for the support of the community yes and screwing the rest of us for ever because the idea that pence is the man in waiting  is terrifying you know one of the trump apparently makes fun of pence quite a bit in the white house you know like you know he thinks he's going to get rid of abortion but it's just going to go to the states they're going to they're going to allow it you know i mean trump does nobody's talking about but it's one more example of something that's horrifying well and it's not all that far off from what penn state is thinking from what hand base religious evangelicals think and we have discussed many times on this show how pens and ted and attorney general sessions and others want to impose any biblical gemini in this country that would over rule simple law i our view of the world this was his quote times are changing but times are changing back now and of course one of the other speakers was duck dynasty's phil robertson who was no he's the least of  right wing so it's very scary stuff and you really need to keep your eye on it i watched some of trouble speech to the heritage foundation this is very tightly scripted around tax cuts but again he is praising them as the important foundational organization and they again you know founded by paul y rick very very right wing very very homophobic d high on their agenda is getting rid of us and of course there are a lot of left wing reporters and progressive activists who go to these conventions and just sit quietly and listen to what's being said and report back to the world and to us about what's going on and one of them talked about how he went to one workshop where they talked about very openly these right wingers about their strategy being to separate the  b t that this divide and conquer business and all the stuff they're doing on transgender stuff is meant to separate us out and to create division and warfare well there is some division  get you get you read the comments sections on some of these games blogs and people say oh you know these goddamn transgender people you know i mean if we know the you know we'd be fine if we didn't have to deal with this issue well guys and mostly it's guys  you know we we gay men are persecuted because we step outside of gender roles i mean i'm going to talk about the able sudan you know case in the world rallies up there and almost all the people up there demonstrating for abel who now identifies as a gay ma activists you know they're there for us the reason the right wing succeeds is because we are suckers for and they divide and conquer strategy whether it is about race or gender or class or  sexual orientation or gender identity we fall for that stuff and we're going to be what we remember what happened when they when they finally were going to vote on our federal civil rights bill and barney frank i'm a human rights campaign took transgender out of it and said you know isn't it better to get something and we said no hundreds of groups across the country said no but they want to head with that anyway and then now they say they'll never do it again well and i remember in  york state when we were fighting for sexual orientation to be included in the hate crimes bill and they wanted to leave out and the black and latino caucus in albany in the state legislature said you are not passing a hate crimes bill unless you include sexual or and that was just leaving sexually yeah them when we passed a sexual orientation nondiscrimination act and it's as late as i believe two thousand and two i had to say you know that say don't do this without clean clothing gender identity and i remember the who the head of the empire state product as saying you would go ahead and just not do it with i said not what never get we're not going to get it and we and we haven't gotten it all these later we have the governor do an executive order on up but that's not permanent as we've learned with president trump to include gender identity as a protected well of course we but my point being that other people have stood up for us yes and  we have certainly on occasion stood up for everybody but we need to do that a lot more we must have a line and says and inclusion of everybody to be able to overcome this right wing  intersectionality i mean the early activists came out of the peace movement the women's movement and the civil rights movement so they already had that sense and those issues it was so evident in act up by the way their way all those people were in the room and that was one reason it worked as well as it did because everybody brought their experiences their values their strategies into that room and we used to work on a lot of those other issues a lot of the time because we were getting anywhere on the rights of the early days i mean we were working on it there was a tremendous amount of work to do but in terms of getting legislative achievements of the early days it was very hard and we still don't have a federal rights bill all right we skipped the the greatest  hope for white supremacist christianity of all and that's right more and he was at the values voters summit and president trump was confronted about moore's completely radical positions which are which are basically that if it's a choice between the constitution and the bible the bible women's rights say these things openly have they pressed this is what's happening to the united states senate they pressed trump on it and he said i'll be meeting with him next week he dodged it but headline a new fox news poll don't usually quote them has him tied with doug jones forty two to forty two now good or bad well it's amazing i would say i mean you know  primaries he is not entirely bulletproof in the political sense but it is certainly going to be difficult if he does i've heard doug jones speak he's unapologetic he's sees smoothies you know former federal prosecutor you know it's so people even see the thing is even if someone like him gets close in a race like that it sends a message to the republican party all across the nation that you keep nominating these crazies you may not lose alabama but you're going to lose the close ones for sure i mean everybody complains that you know all the the trump cabinet appointees who are from congress we didn't win those seats on the democratic i'm not optimistic about next year although i even though i'm trying things just destroying himself on a daily basis i remain convinced that there is a large chance he will be with us for a long time if only we had a party better than the democratic party but that's what we have ok all right let's move on to actual news well so fifteen attorneys general of the united states are opposing trump's ban on introduced legislation in the senate cares joe appearances and collins others to get rid of trump's bar on transgender troops well now identical legislation or similar has been introduced in the house again by a coalition republican charlie dent democrat care skin cinema they are introducing legislation that would forbid discharge of transgender troops and allow everybody to have a chance to serve if they are qualified now i'm turning sixty four dollars i have less than a year to go to medicare i don't know if it's going to be there when next october  thank you but what i'm worried about is on the a c a and we're all terrified of november st when these rates come down the been a lot of news about this week for us the president was really undermining it with these setting up these multiple employer welfare arrangements which allow people to give cut rate plans that don't cover anything that might help you you could get a cut rate a year get a cut rate plan that doesn't cover anything believe me i thought about it yeah but i think they're only going to make it available to young people and take them out of the market and all that kind of stuff but so then the senators alexander and patty murray bipartisan come up with a something to sort of sa not a good thing so i would love to think that that would be a step in that direction first supported and then he was against it who will say who doesn't know what he's talking about is now going to he doesn't know what's in any of but they real question for him because he doesn't know anything and doesn't follow anything and can't read anything in who will have his ear what well his minders whoever they are tell him to do if tony perkins is telling him to and you have you had a republican congressman i believe it was this week saying what we really need is a democratic congress to be a check against yet trump you know that's how bad things are well david jolley former congressman from florida republican said that and he's right of course and if more republicans say that then maybe we can make some headway not the problem is and i've said it before on the shuttle say it again because what we're where we're really getting killed is with the judiciary they have one hundred and fifty judiciary post to fill democrats are slowing them down somewhat using this blue slip thing where were this if you're the senator from that state you could do it but they're going to stack them up and no i haven't seen any republican stand up to any of these appointments and these are extremists i mean you know we i mean maybe we've overuse the word but when you read about you know one of the sky jeff the tear you know talking about transgenders is part of satan's plan  who you know at least sounds somewhat reasonable on some things where are they on this they're going to leave the country in tatters of a strange situation because they are not committed to the resistance they are willing to stick their hand up episodic play but they have no fundamental commitment to resisting trum mccain is actually coming the closest now because he has nothing more to say that is what they are committed to so we're still in very dangerous territory and you know they won and supposin bright light this week was that the attorney general  fulfilling his promise to pursue hate crimes so he's trying to show he's trying to show by his standards you wrote gender identity into this law into this hate crimes law and i am applying the with the laws it says it says sex discrimination it does not say gender identity and our interpretation is that's not covered under the law even though there are many court decisions that say so the problem is that the whole policy and spirit of the trump administration and the department of justice in particular is to discriminate against transgender people and by withdrawing the obama guidelines for schools by not including transgender people and nondiscrimination laws by throwing transgender people out of the military and by cozying up to these bigots who condemn transgender people as creations of satan and put in the them on the federal courts or you know letting them run policy in the white house and the result is the transgender people get murdered so for sessions to suddenly decide that he's going to participate in the prosecution of a murderer of a transgender teenager is hypocrisy of the highest level and really depressing to think about weiss but she is now independent and we look forward to a lot of work life and i should say that the suit itself is being brought by the nonprofit integrity st for america all right let's move on to the horrifying story we heard today as we did our research for the show and then it comes out of california and young gabriel fernandez eight years old tortured to death by his mom's boyfriend and by his mother to some extent now the story from the boyfriend of the little kid is eight years old gabriel the boyfriend is claiming that a part of this is because he thought gabriel was gay and he used to send force him to go to school and dresses that was the twisted thing he did who was this joe arpaio yeah and he also was angry mostly was angry at gabriel because gabriel told his mother to leave this boyfriend and d that sent him into a rage and that's his explanation he snapped well the rage evidently lasted for quite a long time because this is what he did to gabriel he beat him he bit him he burned him with cigarettes he whipped him he shot him with a b b gun he starved him goes this was just torture torture torture torture for an eight year old little boy eight year old so the boyfriend and mother are now being prosecuted we will certainly follow this case but wow well the tradition of just you know beating big a lot of a kid has been going on for a long time and this is just the most extreme example but we've ever read now the other case that we're following quite closely and andy really is the main reporter on this here in the city able sid a neo in the bronx we've talked to you about him he's eighteen years old he was being bullied mercilessly and repeatedly at school when he was being he's eighteen years old he was being bullied mercilessly since the th grade apparently in the th grade his sister told me he decided to grow was here long so we could donate it to cancer patients and so we have long hair go to the th grade he starts getting to some out they start pulling his hair all this kind of stuff but do you know he goes through school he misses a lot of school because he's getting bullied all the time his mother keeps going to the ghouls and saying what he going to do about this oh  l the teachers would say if they call you a faggot you need to be the better person you need to suck it up and you be the better for i mean this is what they're telling them instead of you know disciplining the bullies or trying to do some kind of  kind of a thing where you kind of end this atmosphere so this went on forever so at the end the mts repeating the th grade a lot of he had he had girlfriends and but they had left and they were kind of his protectors because they graduated and he's left behind and so new school year he's in a class and these two guys told the story before but we've learned more details and he told them all to me from rikers island so they jail where he's being held to keep  reading is he didn't know these kids who are involved in the confrontation he did know them he knew them as gang members who might be carrying knives or guns who had already beaten up his best friend so he know them and he was afraid of them he didn't have personal encounters with them but this was so the other ones were throwing stuff they were throwing pencils and pens and things and he you know he just phones and who was doing this to me who is you know you know and and so the kid gets up and says i'm doing it what are you going to do about it basically they use slang and so then he said he felt frozen because this even though the kid was younger than him he was bigger than him and he was afraid of him and the kid who's now deceased starts punching him in the face came fifty feet up the classroom to confront him didn't you know made a very aggressive and then and but seeing that he is holding to his side this knife that  bag it's not going to fight and he starts punching him even when matthew gets stabbed he's still punching him this is what abel told the grand jury this weekend got his charges reduced from murder to manslaughter although i hear the or go someplace else i talk to kids at the demonstration there were a lot of people at the demonstration and i'm sure in the demonstration a lot of transgender activists showed up some of them said look i got out i you know i was home schooled or i just dropped out or i hit the streets this is what they did one of the signs there says suicide or self defense because that's what that's the option for a lot of these kids you know that you're basically being told go kill yourself because the you're going to be tortured so relentlessly and the teachers did nothing so billing law was not being enforced well that's how they're going to make a killing a lot of money off the school system by saying you didn't enforce the law your laws your teachers didn't do anything you didn't have a metal detector either but we don't really want metal detectors in schools we want good environments created for these kids well and we want the environment created from the very beginning this is senior year in high school this should start at st grade or kindergarten this should be a core part of the curriculum from the very very beginning and we have a friend frank jump who teaches the new york city public schools and he taught at a school like that where they did it up to the th grade to the point where the kids didn't want to leave the school because this was such a happy place and then when it went to the middle school where they were going to get tortured and the problem is you've got thing to do and the teachers are afraid of the kids and you have a lot of gang activity in these schools so they're really afraid of them i mean abel's family is saying they have to move because they're afraid of retaliation from these gas and now going to be very di y to get people to testify i did talk to the deceased family matthews family they said matthew was never involved in any of this kind of stuff he was never involved in any violence he was a great kid he went to school all the time he respected his olders i'm just saying that's what they say and i hear that but i'm going to show up but also in the courtroom some of them from the family side were looking over at the transgender folks and saying you he she i'm going to beat the crap out of you when i get out of here so that's what minute we don't we're all on line you know we can look look up look things up there are services for l g b to youth including in the bronx there are out there but no they don't know any of anything and sister didn't know anything about it and she's quite educated she's a graduate of nursing school doesn't surprise me well i mean so my says one of my solutions is every kid needs to get a piece of paper in their hands that says if anything like this happens to you in terms of bullying here are your options and we will follow through on this and make this happen for you and there are places you can go and if you are every kid needs to get a piece of paper that says if your world you be to your questioning there is a place for you to go every kid needs to get that we used to go to schools in the bronx and everywhere else to do education and to take posters they could be hung up in classrooms that told people where to go to get help but those don't exist anymore and the education we did doesn't exist it was episodic at best then and people don't know because there is no commitment in the system to teach our history teach resources teach people getting along with each other teach values none of that is school i don't want to go to school he was so depressed you know i was getting beat up yeah you know this this was nothing new for him so look we'll follow the case we'll let you know what happens with that a lot of people are trying to get him out on bail but they've set the bail of half a one million dollars and in the same category of violence lee this week got a verdict in the case of the chelsea bomber the guy who tried to tell us yeah  right and i have the other bomb that didn't explode and exploded other bombs elsewhere and he was found guilty because they are my on videotape going all around the neighborhood putting the bombs down and then watching them explode  from jersey yeah and then the company church gauged another attack on us this week there was something called the international human rights arts festival for the nd year in a row it featured kathleen turner is supposed to take place they had rented a catholic church called st mary's a manhattan somewhere and the archdiocese said well two of the skits have to do with homosexuality i mean one was about coming out one was about transgender if you'll take them out you can still have it at our catholic church and they said  s that the archdiocese hasn't stopped you know as long as you don't challenge church teaching you know on this you don't let it be publicly known well they but they were publicly known as your closeted and episcopal church in brooklyn stepped in and took the festival so they had it on sunday night all right latest harvey weinstein update well there are several things going on here st of all one of the people who has spoken up is the actress and model  weinstein said to her because she is publicly out i guess she said if he said to her if you are out as a lesbian you will never have hash tag all week of millions i think of women have been coming almost everyone i know is proposed that about this about it's some time being sexually harassed by a boss by a person with power over them and  some men you know and including actor james van der beek who just said when he was young actor you know he was some guy grabbed as some director grabbed his crotch and also actor michael gast on  spoke out saying he was grabbed by in the groin by a powerful theater director i mean it you know there's a lot of that in the theater and the other interesting thing and we talk and occasional woman not a man but it's very very occasional b s and keisha lee who i said to talked about having to be virtually naked line up with a female producer demanding that probably it they've got to stop be professional and be human and don't be illegal and there's also the story that we have heard about before and talked about purveyor was going along with us and supporting harvey and doing this and i'm happy to say that the amp far staff kevin frost executive director and others were horrified at this and kept objecting to it and trying to stop it and in the end kenneth cole just overruled everybody and made it happen but the whole story is now on the huffington post in a very long detailed report which is fascinating and well worth reading and is again about harvey weinstein being a bully and a narcissist who just demands that everything go  fore him still not as bad as the norse assistant chief who do has a foundation in collects charitable contributions and uses them all for himself someone told me oh my i see a dentist told me health agency here in new york is sending emergency medical response teams to puerto rico that's the st community health center to do so some hospitals are involved very much to erode your california governor jerry brown signed a law making it easier to change gender markers on state issued identification documents and created it also creates a gender neutral non binary carrot category in addition to male and female and this is for  kinds of things also signed a bill mandating data collection on l g b t people in state employment surveys and education surveys we all want to be like california but we're not ye homecoming king right congratulations styles we almost had a transgender winner on jeopardy this week the non school school board as voted to continue protecting l g b t q students and employee there was some tumbled about that and counties in maryland and michigan have voted to protect transgender students frederick county and glass lake michigan georgia is considering some work on that and new york state now has as of today the st openly gay member of our state's highest court the court of appeals all fine men congratulations to you paul forever and we told you what test week about how we have the ceremony to plant  yeah so it's up there on the flagpole but they're calling it sending land so michael patrol us another activist went back there this week to play and to a rainbow flag the federal law and we will be waving them  bisexual in honor of national coming out day and here's what she said she said i'm a member of the community i'm a bisexual black woman she said under the trumpet ministration proactive visibilities seems more important than ever it is certainly does absolutely if her mom is the good side effect of all this in vermont they held a ceremony to place and the quality for same sex couples historic site marker at the capitol in montpelier to mark the fact that vermont through a court ruling and a vote by the legislature was the st place to legalize same sex partnerships with civil unions east st street but you can get more information about it by going to the m o b i mobilize in our brothers initiative dash and my c dot com website this is going to have a black  it's a great effort now this might not sound like something we would normally celebrate but the smithsonian's national museum of american history has acquired an archival collection led to the work of john smith as it might be a former minister who ran conversion therapy stuff now i think he's repented of all that but we but his archives are important yes i mean what our enemies were doing all these years is also important important part of our history and the madison society down there in washington had a lot to do with making sure that this was acquired international i think we have something about conversion therapy there of looking for this segue oh he in the united kingdom the royal college of psychiatrists has apologized answer and some people are upset about this but if we don't if we don't we're not counted if we don't know what we've got we don't know and it's a very important thing it's all part of the process of normalisation is that we we want doctors to be comfortable asking we want them to understand the issues around peoples of various sexual orientations and gender identities and we want the patients to be able to be forthright about who they really are and what is really going on in their lives just as we want routine hiv testing and everything else we want a more open and honest world as i said just a couple of weeks ago in the show telling a story from the past i was asked when i was a eighteen when i went to would be the clinic by the friendly and that suggests he was not going to have religious objections exactly in taiwan we've been waiting for a decision from the high court about marriage but they last week rejected the marriage requests they legalisation request from a lesbian couple they say that parliament has not acted yet as they are required to do by a previous court decision so the two year deadline for that is not up yet so the high court was unwilling to move on its own staying with marriage in austria no it looks like the government there is moved to the right but the constitutional court has to me what was important was they were extremely adamant and explicit about the fact that registered partnerships were not sufficient that you must give people the word marriage that separate but equal is not an acceptable system you have to include in and in costa rica november th through eleven they're going to hold the st conference on an equal civil marriage and there will be people from all over the world there including evan wolfson and the sponsors include the embassies of the united states canada and switzerland it's going to be a really big conference on international marriage issues not  tony perkins gets wind of it he watches the show every week and speaking of international marriage celebrity cruises cruise line ships say claim that they are the st to offer worldwide same sex marriage most of their ships are registered in malta and because malta now legalized same sex marriage they can offer that on their ships and who says you can't change in britain a white supremacist a famous one has is renouncing his extremism and he's coming out of the closet as a gay man with jewish ancestry he said you know and make this stuff up and said you know i realize that you know blaming actually blaming actions on the jews as a group well that that's a kind of generalization that leads to six million people being deliberately murdered let me write that and he he admits that being a nazi who was gay but with a jewish background is a contradiction well he's sorting it out here is the council of europe parliament has adopted a resolution condemning unnecessary surgery on intersex people they support bodily integrity to this standard practice for each nuns has been to automatically do surgery it on infants to correct their does the catholic church say about that exactly what does the catholic church say about that well the un human rights organization is condemning the arrest and torture is of gay people in  an egypt and indonesia and there's been more crackdown in egypt where the local security forces this week raided cafes and downtown cairo rounding up gay people and  kind of buried the lead comes from russia where maxim lop off we have a picture of him chechen he is russian but he was living in chechnya would move to chechnya but already where he was dragged out of his home in the middle of the night and taken to a secret hiding place and taken to a blood soaked jail cell let out daily with a plastic bag over his head to be beaten by police officers and demand that he confessed to being gay and of course the other thing they want out of you was who the other game yeah i mean he's got to give a babes and you know he's just telling all in the hopes of course because the government keeps saying what are you believe that some of them were subject to honor killings and of course we've as we've told you some of them get out they get out to russia or they get out to canada or wherever and then they're hunted down by foreign national ch stand store and i open up the new york times today and it's the business section is about toxic stan getting financing for their country from outside you know investors in hong kong a puerto rican h i v clinic the space was flooded with sewage materials and supplies for lost it's just another example of the devastation of a hurricane in puerto ric as as you pointed out if you don't care about puerto ricans the with the president does and you want to at least care about the fact that they make many of our pharmaceuticals with a manufacture them and they're having a great deal of difficulty with that you may feel the director of encores d and their production of assassins which we saw earlier this year dropped out at four thousand and nineteen dollars weeks after he was diagnosed with hiv his friends had thought he was looking he went into the hospital and people thought oh well you know people don't die from that these days he'll get the drugs he'll be ok nine weeks later it's gone too far that's what can happen to can be relentless ye what you if you test positive and certainly if you are beginning to have symptoms check it out don't wait till the last minute or all right segue from aids news to entertainment and waiting for the last minute to beats per minute yeah this is the french film by robin campi oh is that how we say his name and he was in act up paris veteran there's a so there's a still from the film he's the guy who also directed eastern boys which we had a high and that you know  an action at a pharmaceutical company where they were you know putting fake blood on the walls and putting up signs saying assassin and i thought those were really the most effective scenes they also have a lot of scenes at the paris act up meetings i mean it takes you right inside them and then of course there's romances that take place and of course death and dying issues that it that it covers i wasn't crazy about the film but i am too close to it and i was too involved and act up new york one of the leaders of back well i'd like to say there were no leaders but but i was certainly heavily involved now i never attended an act up paris meeting so i can't talk about how accurate the film and portraying that to me the scenes in the film of the meeting more or a little too humorless a little too process oriented a little too small but i don't know maybe that's what those meetings were like right it wasn't because of new york you were you had five hundred people a week and down for you and yes starting with a couple one hundred at the community center and then growing and growing and growing eventually moving to cooper union but there was a lot more energy and a lot more film i thought the sexiness of it was representative and good but it all seemed a little small to me but my experience was of something that was very big so and this was a big award winner at the cannes film festival re guys in it working at a store kind of one of them paralyzed by the aids crisis and not wanting to go out and not wanting to face it and all that kind of stuff and i just sadly felt that it was kind of a nerd as a play i thought i would be i think it probably worked a lot better twenty five years ago well if you want to see a whole panoply of l g b t and aids films this weekend the new york city new fast film festival is on they have one hundred and forty different films from the th to the th and it's intimate i'd tell you some of the highlights but there are so many i can't possibly go through them in less than the full hour of the show so go to new fast dot org to pick and choose among the ones you want to see there are a lot of interesting films and here's something you can see if you get b b c america if you have it on demand on your television b b c america ran th series called queers these twenty minute monologues friend tested really written at least the one by alan cumming as the guy is about to get married they all take place in a bar and they're all monologues  v series episode farm reveals that anthony rap and wilson cruise are a same sex couple in space yeah and on and from the ridiculous to the more ridiculous the young and the restless they are developing a lesbian story line between two young women in their twenty's and they're sort of certainly needs either and had a kiss and they end st one wants to talk about the other one doesn't and then that one wants to talk about any other one doesn't so they're they're working through this very slowly and i wish i could recommend the revival of time of the conway's because i like j b priestly who wrote it and i like elizabeth mcgovern from downton abbey but it's really a last word yes well he's been dead for eighteen years so really yes i remember having dinner with him