About

Patrick Yaeger

“I was raised in an outer suburb of Louisville, Kentucky in Bullitt County – part of an area known as the Bible Belt where socially conservative evangelical Protestantism dominates the culture – during the 1970′s when the American religious right with their extremely anti-gay ideology was beginning its political ascent. Upon high school graduation, I fled north to the liberal sanctuary Oberlin College and graduated in 1995 with a Bachelor of Music. Since then I’ve lived in New York City and Kentucky working variously as a public school teacher, office temp, web designer and most recently, an online media curator.

"It was during my first days matriculating to Oberlin in 1989, about 20 years ago, that I first realized what it was to feel safe and welcomed as a gay person. I vividly remember sitting with other freshmen students as we were asked who among us were gay; we were asked not as a sign of derision but as one of respect for diversity. I attended meetings of the Oberlin LGBT student group off and on during my college years, and participated in pro-gay chalkings and local mall hand-holding demonstrations. It was at Oberlin that I confronted for the first time my own internalized homophobia (self-hatred) and began the work of healing from the fear and shame I hadn't been able to defend against absorbing (though I had tried mightily) during my youth in Kentucky. Without a doubt, at Oberlin, surrounded by wonderful progressive people, my consciousness was raised to understand the greater LGBT Civil Rights Movement and my inextricable place in it.

"In 2001 while living in New York City, I rented some web server space and began experimenting with a personal blog called Queer Visions. It wasn't anything special, just a place to rant, explore my nerdy side and feature interesting content of no particular focus, but it gave me a taste of what the blogging world was all about and the power of online media.

"And so, over the years, I began seeing that a lot of great media focused on the fight for LGBT equality was going undiscovered. And when Proposition 8 passed in California, I decided I wanted to play some part in fixing what I considered a disconnect. I wanted to bridge the gap between the fledgling post Prop 8 equality activists and the educational empowering quality media that I knew was out there. And since other popular LGBT political websites (like Pam's House Blend, The Bilerico Project and Towleroad) already did commentary so well, I wanted to de-emphasize commentary and stick as much as possible to simply great multimedia. Thus, in 2008 and 2009, I began creating what I now call Gay Rights Media:

"I repurposed my personal blog to my new gay rights media cause and renamed it 'Gay Rights Media'. Almost simultaneously, I created the Gay Rights Media page on Facebook as well as other collections on YouTube, Twitter and Flickr. There are also collections on FriendFeed and VodPod.

"Last year, I took my activism offline and onto the road, joining the Maine 'No On 1' campaign to save marriage equality there just as it was about to be enacted; I wanted to be more hands on with the incredible movement I knew so much about from curating the Gay Rights Media collections. Volunteering for over a month, I met countless LGBT community organizers, leaders and local allies who thought, like me, that maybe this time we could defeat the fear-based smears of the anti-gay industries.

"Sadly, and to my great shock, the people of Maine vetoed marriage rights for the gay and lesbian minority of their state. I was overwhelmed by the grief all around as Maine coupes realized their joyous wedding plans were to be canceled and all our long hard fought efforts had been shunned. But we know the fight will be fought again, perhaps next time in the courts.

"Currently, I'm helping with the effort to bring the federal trial Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which seeks to overturn California's Proposition 8, to a wider audience. The documentarian and film producer behind the Prop 8 trial video re-enactments, John Ireland, accepted my offer to redesign their website at http://www.MarriageTrial.com. I think that project compliments nicely my ongoing mission to curate great multimedia of the LGBT Civil Rights Movement.

"Harnessing the power of the web to get more eyes in front of important media in service of a higher purpose has been a great privilege." ~@PatrickYaeger

You can find Patrick Yaeger online at Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

"Homophobia is like racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in that it seeks to dehumanize a large group of people, to deny their humanity, their dignity and personhood. This sets the stage for further repression and violence that spread all too easily to victimize the next minority group. || We have a lot more work to do in our common struggle against bigotry and discrimination. I say "common struggle" because I believe very strongly that all forms of bigotry and discrimination are equally wrong and should be opposed by right-thinking Americans everywhere. Freedom from discrimination based on sexual orientation is surely a fundamental human right in any great democracy, as much as freedom from racial, religious, gender, or ethnic discrimination." ~Coretta Scott King

"When someone asks me, "are gay rights civil rights?" my answer is always, "Of course, they are." Civil rights are positive legal prerogatives: the right to equal treatment before the law. These are the rights shared by everyone. There is no one in the United States who does not, or should not, enjoy or share in enjoying these rights. Gay and lesbian rights are not special rights in any way. It isn't "special" to be free from discrimination. It is an ordinary, universal entitlement of citizenship." ~NAACP National Chairman Julian Bond

"The job of the gay community is not to deal with extremists who would castigate us or put us on an island and drop an H-bomb on us. The fact of the matter is that there is a small percentage of people in America who understand the true nature of the homosexual community. There is another small percentage who will never understand us. Our job is not to get those people who dislike us to love us. Nor was our aim in the civil rights movement to get prejudiced white people to love us. Our aim was to try to create the kind of America, legislatively, morally, and psychologically, such that even though some whites continued to hate us, they could not openly manifest that hate. That's our job today: to control the extent to which people can publicly manifest antigay sentiment." ~Bayard Rustin (civil rights activist and gay man who advised MLKjr and organized the 1963 March on Washington)

"Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself." ~Harvey Fierstein

"Burst down those closet doors once and for all, and stand up and start to fight." ~Harvey Milk

Influences: Harvey Milk, Larry Kramer, Gene Robinson, Mel White, Matthew Shephard, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, Siddhartha Gautama.