Castro District, Castro San Francisco guide and voice of the gay and lesbian community!

One of America's best-known TV moms comes out of the closet as a real-life lesbian.

Since her TV career heyday in the 1970s and '80s as a darling of the popular prime-time series Family and Family Ties, Meredith Baxter has mainly flown under the radar, with the exception of a few acclaimed turns in made-for-TV movies such as My Breast and A Woman Scorned: The Betty Broderick Story. That is until she boarded the Sweet Caribbean Cruise with thousands of other lesbians last month. If the woman who famously played Elyse Keaton, liberal mother to Michael J. Fox's conservative Alex on the long-running sitcom Family Ties, thought she would go unnoticed amid generations of gay women who idolized her for her blond-haired, blue-eyed, all-American good looks, she was wrong...

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It remains unclear exactly how this new strategy will impact epidemics among gay men and other key populations. In fact, the speech hardly mentioned them at all.

Hillary Clinton announces initiative.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a landmark speech on Tuesday declaring a new direction in the U.S. response to the global AIDS epidemic. Citing a number of recent studies on the efficacy of different biomedical approaches for preventing HIV, Clinton announced that an HIV-free generation is now within reach.

"While the finish line is not yet in sight," she said, "we know we can get there, because we know the route we need to take."

The new U.S. commitment to an "HIV-Free Generation" — and the accompanying three-point action strategy centered around prevention of mother-to-child transmission, medical male circumcision, and treatment-as-prevention — represents one of the first attempts to translate this new HIV prevention science into a broad-scale policy priority...

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FORT COLLINS, Colo. -- A transgender student at Fort Collins High School is transferring to another school after administrators raised questions over her use of a restroom. The Castro District is outraged.

Dionne Malikowski said she should have the same rights as any student to use the bathroom of her choice. Dionne was born male and now identifies as a female."You don't have to have certain parts to be the sex that you feel like," Dionne said.

The 16-year-old high school junior told 7NEWS she was suspended about a month ago for violating the school policy by using a girls' restroom instead of a staff restroom. Again, the Castro district feels this punishment is severe and overstated at a minimum.

"The day that I used the girls' bathroom, I was in a hurry because I really had to go," Dionne explained...

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WE WERE HERE" — ★★★1/2 — documentary about the beginning of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco; not rated but probable R (mature themes); Broadway

"We Were Here" shows that a situation you think you know can be something you haven't known at all. That is the surprise, and the power, of this unexpected film. Castro San Francisco residents believe this is a must see.

An extraordinarily moving examination of how the AIDS epidemic both devastated and transformed San Francisco's gay community including the Castro, this clear-eyed and soulful documentary brings us inside the contagion in a way that is so intimate, so personal, you feel like you're hearing about these catastrophic events for the first time...

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