lgbt community

Philadelphia City Council passed a first of its kind LGBT Equality bill on April 25.

Bill 130224, which passed with a 14-three vote, would not only give a tax credit incentive to businesses that offered employee health plans that would include same-sex partners and children, but it would also include a substantial amount of benefits to the transgender community as well.

The bill ,which was introduced by Councilman Jim Kenney, would revamp the city’s health care plan to ban discrimination against non-union transgender city employees and would instate a Transgender Health Tax Credit that would allow companies to offer healthcare specific-needs to the transgender community. Read more »

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is targeting the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community with a new installment of their anti-smoking campaign.

As CNN notes, there's an alarming disproportion between the smoking rate in the LGBT community compared to the general population, according to a report released by the American Lung Association. The smoking rate is 70 percent higher in the LGBT community than it is for heterosexual Americans, according to director of the CDC’s Office on Smoke and Health, Dr. Tim McAfee.

Ellie Nicholas, a non-smoker who appears in the campaign both alone and with her partner, shares her story of suffering from asthma due to secondhand smoke. Read more »

A new study tracking the percentage of gay and lesbian adults in America has established a first-ever demographic atlas of the group, finding that state populations range from a low of 1.7% of in North Dakota to a high of 10% in the District of Columbia.

The study, conducted by Gallup Poll Editor-in-Chief Frank Newport and UCLA scholar Gary J. Gates is the largest population-based survey to include a state-by-state measurement of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender identification. Read more »

Beverly Taylor, 81, and Edie Brown, 77, have been together for 37 years. The same-sex couple married in Canada in 2005.

"Everybody hopes to age in place, but when something happens to one of us, it's going to be very difficult to stay here," Brown said of their Ventura double-wide mobile home.

They feel certain Brown's sister would care for one or both of them, should it become necessary, but they realize a skilled-nursing facility or assisted-living center is always a possibility.

Neither would hide their sexual identity at such a place, but "I don't think we'd run up the rainbow flag," Taylor joked. Read more »