When I first worked on RESCQU.NET’s resources database as a temporary volunteer, I had no idea what I was in for. 

There we were, in the Lair of Abraxas, for an event to build a database of over 150 LGBTQ+ resources, and I was looking over several weeks worth of work, matching organizations with their contact information.  There was a long way to go, but I approached it as a logic game.

The night was full of tea and friends, and I even got a T-shirt at the end! Weeks of work beforehand started to come to fruition. At the end of the night our leader, Samantha, approached me. She complimented me on my work in the database over the prior few weeks and asked me how I felt about it. 

And then she asked me if I'd like to join the team, curating this database permanently—the rest is history. 

I’m Ricki Palmisano, and this is the resource database. 

A main feature of the database is the ‘vetting’ process. We will call and email each organization to make sure we have the best anonymous contact for closeted and out folks alike. Automation is something we can look forward to, but for now, I’m working out the kinks, and enjoying the one-on-one time I get to have with some of our founding partner organizations.

Beyond the Mirror:

Is an identity counseling service flew through the vetting process and I’m proud to have them on our list! They are useful for folks questioning, still in the closet, or at any point in their journey. They provide services specialized for teens and those with eating disorders. Look up their name or ‘counseling’ on our database to find their anonymous contact or your own local equivalent LGBT+ counseling services.

Take a look at our database to find these resources and more. Type in the organization’s name into the search bar on the upper right-hand corner of the database window.

Now I have a new task in front of me: How do we make this database easy to navigate? 

Together, Samantha and I came up with a solution: a way to tag each organization with searchable keywords that you would use to find that resource. That way people could easily find the resources most useful to them at the time they need it. 

Over time, spearheading the database has become a bit more organized.  I brought a friend of mine with me to volunteer and now I have a partner in crime.  Together our goal is to make the database as full and accessible as possible. 

If you have any questions on how to use the database or have a suggestion of your own, you can email me anonymously at Ricki.Palmisano@rescqu.net! (I’m closet-friendly, too)

Ricki is the Database coordinator for RESCQU.NET. She vets and establishes partnerships with organizations to ensure closet-friendly resources are in the database.

Credible resources are important. This is always the case. Believe me, I’m an English teacher. 

Unfortunately, credible resources are not exactly simple. 

Some topics have a wealth of resources which create a variety of conflicting opinions you have to tease through. Other issues have a small pool of resources to pick from causing you to lose out on valuable, silenced perspectives. 

Especially where the LGBT+ minority is concerned. 

When it comes to your identity, having a variety of resources, opinions, and people to learn from is vital, but can give you more misinformation. And on the other hand, you cannot, or at least should not, tailor yourself to fit a smaller pool of resources that could be incorrect.

So in this blog, we’re going to teach you how to identify credible information, and deal with the regrettably low amount of information out there for LGBTQ+ people.

1. Primary sources are fist-hand accounts of individual stories. are necessary because they are the easiest to empathize with. 

They’re people telling you stories about who they are. They can come from friends, family, or even some random blogger, but their stories are raw and authentic to themselves. 

2. Secondary sources like articles, reviews, and academic papers, break down the stories, identify trends among similar stories, and provide validation to a single person’s or group’s experience.

3. Tertiary resources like Wikipedia pages, textbooks and encyclopedias zoom out and compile all of the first-person data, and reviews to present it in a bigger format.  Conflicting stories can be put together to establish the pros and cons.  They can more reliably illustrate the complexity of situations. They make it easier to access and to trust.

They are out in the world, discovering themselves for the first time, and want help but they're not getting it. 

The map below lists all of the states with “no promo homo” laws. While the name sounds hilarious, the intentions are more nefarious.

These “no promo homo” laws silence students and teachers from talking about LGBTQ+ issues.   

​They prevent critical information from being taught to LGBTQ youth. 

And sadly, This only records policy.  Not Culture.  This information is not being taught in tons of grey states either. 

These laws directly impact students’ health and well-being. The red states showed actively suppress LGBTQ sex education.  If you, a student or a parent of an LGBT+ student, find yourself in want or need of better sex education, you’ll have to find better resources. 

​Despite these studies being crucial resources necessary for schools to provide to suicidal youth, they were, unfortunately, tricky to find.

And it’s not going to get any easier.

The Census Bureau, our nation’s primary source for data, announced in March of 2017, that it would not include LGBTQ questions on the 2020 census.

After reading the Planned 2020 census, the only whisper of sexuality I found was in the “relationship to housemates section,” So LGBTQ+ people would have to be married to and/or living with a same-sex partner to count as LGBTQ if they even report their marriage, to begin with. There is no mention of gender identity. 

This may be looking pretty grim for you if you are an LGBTQ-identified person searching for resources.  But we at RESCQU NET are working on it. 

​Today is a big day.  

In observance of Veterans Day, at the launch of Transgender Awareness Week, and coming to you one week before Transgender Day of Remembrance, I want to observe the gravity of the month of November for the LGBT+ community in this blog.

Today, as we show gratitude and appreciation for those who have fought bravely for our liberties and freedoms, we must also remember that many service members do not have adequate access to the support they need and deserve; both LGBT+ and cis-straight veterans.

In this blog, I will bring up several of the hurdles and pitfalls that keep these veterans and soldiers silent, in the closet, or stealth throughout their service, and afterward. 

And for those of you in this situation, we’d like to provide some resources to give you that support and make sure you’re heard.

Up until the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DA;DT) in the U.S. military, there was minimal information on the specific concerns that LGBT+ service members faced. 

In 2010, The Williams Institute of UCLA released a report on the estimated number of lesbian, gay, and bisexual men and women in the military.  

It showed that they comprised roughly 2.2% of all military personnel. 

In 2014 UCLA released a new report stating there were over 150,000 active transgender individuals in the armed forces.

While this data shed some light on the existence of LGBT+ military personnel, it obviously could not account for closeted individuals. Despite having the opportunity to serve openly, many military personnel did not, and still do not feel safe to come out within today’s military culture. 

​Older LGBT+ veterans face further difficulties when it comes to their discharge status. 

Since 1993, more than 13,000 individuals were discharged due to Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. 
.
Individuals discharged for homosexuality were discharged with a "less than honorably" status that can be difficult to dispute. 

A less than honorable discharge effectively bars these individuals from receiving veterans benefits, cost them government positions, and comes with a burden of shame. 

Discharge statuses can be now can reviewed and changed to honorable for DA;DT reasons, but that process is untimely and demands a fair bit of paperwork. So many LGBT+ veterans have lived with their lower statuses for so long that their lives have been significantly set back by it and no correction will be enough to recover that lost time, effort, social position, and money.

​Organizations are working to support LGBT+ veterans in various areas, such as AVER (American Veterans for Equal Rights), but what is needed most is broad wide-sweeping changes to the cultural approaches the military takes to protect, advocate for, and empower military personnel - both during and after serving.  

The best thing an ally can do, however, is to listen and then respond with support by boosting the stories of LGBT+ veterans issues.  Donate to media organizations like GLAAD, the Personal Stories Project, and other organizations that seek to signal boost veterans, and contribute to the financial health of the organizations we recommend below:

Lane is the Facilitator of the newly formed Bisexual / Pansexual group Bitter / Sweet.  She's spent most of her life counseling troubled youth and the LGBT+ community.  She's recently married her husband and experiences the same Bi-erasure she is supporting you with now.  Join her group! ​

Sorry for the click-bait.  It's not the food kind.  But, this is important so keep reading! 

​You’ve probably heard the term “cookie” thrown around while browsing the Internet. Recently, there’s been a big change to these “cookies.”  And that change is vital to your net-safety. 

When you go to a website, a new European Law called GDPR now requires companies to inform you that it uses these "cookies"to track some of the things you do on their site (and afterward).

So we’re going to briefly discuss in this blog, what a cookie is when they can infringe on your privacy and then we’ll show you how to avoid the dangerous ones.  

​ The term originated as a “computer nerd” expression describing a set of data that is sent from a site’s server to your computer, and that comes back unchanged, called a “magic cookie.”

Technically speaking, the cookies saved to your web browser create a dictionary of all kinds of information related to you; what you’ve browsed and information that helps web pages give you a better experience on their sites. Websites use cookies for all kinds of things, and not all of them are bad.  Indeed marketers use them to make website advertising a kinder place for you.

But, you can think of cookies as a collection of membership cards.

When you navigate to a site, it provides you a cookie that says “I’ve been here and am interested in these things.”  The sites then request them back from your browser to verify who you are, what you’re on the site for and then they custom-tailor their information for you based on the cookies you have.

​For example...
When you log in to your bank’s website, the site will “start a session” for you and that session is tracked with a cookie. This cookie cannot be accessed by other websites, but when you log into your bank again, there's no need to provide a password because the cookie already "verified" you.  This cookie is helpful.

But when you browse a shopping website and click on an item, many shopping websites will track that item in a “recently viewed” area of the shopping site by giving you a cookie that tracks what items you’ve viewed. This one could be used to out you.

After leaving that shopping site, you may also notice that same item shows up in an advertisement on another website because it requested your “Amazon Products” cookie. That’s where things start to feel a little unsettling for most people.

Frankly speaking, No. There's not really an easy way.

But there are two ways if you're willing to do it. (If not, skip to what you can do to prevent cookies).

1. "View Page Info" 
​In Firefox, you can see if a website is using cookies by right-clicking any inactive part of a web page (for example, away from all the links and pictures) and select “View Page Info.” 

This provides a dizzying amount of information. We’ll likely discuss this view in a later 201 blog, but at least some of it will probably make sense to you. 

If you look under the “Security” tab, you’ll find things like the website identity, how many times your browser thinks you’ve visited the site, and whether it uses cookies or not. 

At this point, you can clear the cookies just for the site you’re on if you want. This is a "reasonably" simple way to see if cookies are in use on the site you’re looking at, but it's really not ley-person friendly.

2. The Storage Inspector
You can also see all of the cookies your browser has recorded in Firefox using SHIFT-F9 to bring up the “Storage Inspector.” From there, you’ll see a menu on the left for different ways the site can store information. One of those is “Cookies.” If you expand and highlight the site you’re interested in, the grid will then contain all the cookies that are currently active for the site.

What you're probably going to be most interested in are the “Name” and “Value” fields.

Clicking on a cookie record will bring up the details, but to get a good look at a cookie, you have to expand the “Data” window on the right side of the SHIFT-F9 window.

For Example:  Using the Wikipedia Cookie Page
Just to give you a little taste of what you might find, I tried the Wikipedia cookie page. And, guess what? 

It saved the location I’m browsing the page from in a cookie called “GeoIP.”

Why does Wikipedia need to know where I am to provide the information I requested??? 

See how this works? Imagine if you’ve been doing personal research at the library, and you log in to a site you’re using. That site may put your location data in a cookie. Some cookies stick around – so later another website you visit can capture that cookie. So, now, two websites can figure out that you’ve visited this other site from the library.

1 - Clear Your Cookies!
Make it a regular practice to clear your cookies before you move onto or away from sites you don’t want people to know you’re on. 

This does delete helpful cookies like session logins but we feel it’s worth the inconvenience.

2 - Use Private Browsing Modes
Another approach is to use the incognito mode available in most browsers when doing personal research on LGBTQ+ related things.  Be sure to start a new incognito session every time you want to go to a new page (easier said than done). 

To do this, you can copy the link you want to go to next by right-clicking on the link and selecting something like “Copy Link Address.” After you’ve copied the link, you can close your incognito session and start a new one.  Then copy that link in the new incognito session. 

This prevents the sites from talking to each other through your browser.

Here’s more information on how to view and delete cookies on the top used browsers:

1. How do I see and control cookies in my web browser?
2. More on the Firefox Storage Inspector.
3. Get to know how different cookies work using this awesome Infographic!

The “View Page Info” feature in Firefox is relatively unique to that browser and can really help you just get to know some of the basic things that are going on when you browse websites – knowledge is power :)

And this chorus is EMPOWERING.  If my “lifestyle” isn’t a choice, nobody can be expected to change me.

This singular sentiment revokes the power of hundreds of arguments for homophobes and transphobes.

But,  it's also disenfranchising.

​Erin is the volunteer with the largest tenure here at RESCQU.NET because it allows her to keep connected with the LGBT+ community.  As a bi woman who is soon to be getting married to her future husband she feels deeply for the community and wants to keep that connection.  So she works to train our volunteers, welcome our new community members, and keep the wheels turning.