The Bilerico Project | Daily experiments in LGBTQ

It's the first What You Need To Know of 2013, and in recognition of that fact, you'll find no looking back in today's links. Instead, all of today's stories are relevant to 2013, which of course is why there aren't as many as usual. The news cycle is still enjoying its orgy of false nostalgia for Gangnam Style, the presidential campaign, and the other myriad news stories, good and bad, that made up the last year. But here at Bilerico, we're moving on.

Instead, I'd like to treat today's WYNTK as something of a baseline. A snapshot, if you will, of the LGBT movement at the start of the twenty-teens. It's pretty marriage-laden, in no small part due to the fact that Maryland and Maine began having same-sex marriages around or on New Years.

Those marriages are historic in their own right, but also fell at a time when there wasn't a lot of other news being made. Still, there are other stories worth noting as well, and it should be interesting to see over the course of the next few months whether these issues continue to define our place in the world, or if there's something new, for good or ill, still waiting over the horizon.

So here's the beginning of What You Need To Know for 2013:

• New Years Eve saw the first same sex marriages in Maryland, just a few days after Maine began marrying same-sex couples.
• Puerto Rico may see a renewed push for an LGBT inclusive hate-crimes law in the new year.
• An LGBT youth counselor in Uganda has been arrested on charges of "recruiting youth into homosexuality."
• LGBT couples in Mobile, Alabama intend to seek marriage licenses at the end of the week. Couples in other southern states may be planning to do the same.
• Concerns over Chuck Hagel's anti-LGBT voting record and previous impolitic statements on gay people continue to worry the LGBT community, and have prompted condemnation from Barney Frank.
• A bill to legalize marriage equality in Illinois could see a vote very soon.
• In that vein, Rhode Island's state legislature will have their own marriage equality bill introduced, possibly as soon as Thursday.
• The conservative right is predictably upset over a Disney Channel "Make Your Mark" video featuring a boy with lesbian parents.
• The Illinois Family Institute, fresh off their sadistic victory against the rights of trans* children, has launched an aggressive opposition campaign aimed at the push for marriage equality in Illinois.
• Thomas Beatie, the trans* man who made national news when he choose to carry his and his wife's three children, is now facing legal challenges to a petition for divorce due to a legal morass involving his birth gender and his state of residence's same-sex marriage ban.
• In a remarkable about-face, Bishop Simeon Hall, past president of the Bahamas Christian Council, has publicly called out pastors who demonize gays and lesbians, even going so far as to point out that a relentless focus on the issue of LGBT people could be a byproduct of latent same-sex attraction.
• Finally, a powerful accounting of struggling for self-acceptance, familial acceptance, and above all love, in circumstances more challenging than many of us have known (and that are all-too familiar to the rest). h/t to Towleroad:

("Sunset" - photo © Wintersong Tashlin, used with permission, all rights reserved )