Beginning Friday, January 10, a complimentary shuttle (provided by FAB2GO) will change the lives of tourists (and those living near the beach) forever. The shuttle will run continuously from 7 p.m. to 1 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, putting the minds of thousands of gay tourists at ease.

The shuttle is scheduled to make pick-ups and drop-offs at a number of Fort Lauderdale resorts, including Alcazar Worthington Guesthouse, W Hotel Fort Lauderdale and the B Ocean Hotel. On the Wilton Manors side, Rumors Bar & Grill and Courtyard Cafe will act as the destination/departure points.

For more information visit gogayfortlauderdale.com or call 305-798-5455.

“I’ve been doing drag for 20 years now (Kitty a bit longer),” Daisy told us. “In that time we’ve never seen anyone do a night in a bowling alley – that’s why we picked it! We’ve both been bowling of course, and since it’s always fun, [we] thought ‘what if we could add our crazy creativity and years of experience to an already fun event?’ It’ll be like Gay Bowling at Disney World!”

Daisy will be DJ’ing as well, spinning 80′s and 90′s, Hip  Hop, Pop, Rock “and everything in between.” The night will also feature DJ Rob who will be on hand so that Daisy can run around, host and perform along with Kitty.

“We’re rolling a red carpet down the center bowling lane and that’s gonna be the girls stage,” explains Daisy. “It’s like a drag queen’s wet dream. That long runway in the middle of the action! There will be performances popping up all night long. We’ll also be giving away prizes. We have a giant wheel that folks can spin and win things, like free drinks or free bowling. Also, at every lane you can order bottle service!

With a full bar and kitchen, the two performers want everyone to be happy. They’re even offering a free bottle per week to an attendee who’s celebrating a birthday.

“With Kitty’s over the top grand fabulousity (which by the way- comes from her stunning fashion) and my comedy, [I] think it’s a perfect combo.”

The party will take place every Tuesday (starting this Tuesday the 29th) at the recently remodeled Diamond Strike in Pompano Beach.

On Thursday morning, Manning’s attorney read a statement from the army private on NBC’s “Today” show. “I am Chelsea Manning,” the statement read. “I am a female. Given the way that I feel, and have felt since childhood, I want to begin hormone therapy as soon as possible. I hope that you will support me in this transition. I also request that, starting today, you refer to me by my new name and use the female pronoun (except in office mail to the confinement facility). I look forward to receiving letters from supporters and having the opportunity to write back.”

The letter was signed “Chelsea E. Manning.”

On Tuesday, March 12, a new, reworked version of the legislation (SB 196) was scheduled to be read before the Senate Children, Families and Elder Affairs Committee, chaired by State Sen. Eleanor Sobel (D-Hollywood), the measure’s sponsor. However, Sobel postponed a reading of he legislation for the second time in weeks. The absence of State Sen. Geraldine Thompson (D-Orlando), due to illness, would have cost Sobel one of only four guaranteed “yes” votes on the committee.

The bill would create a statewide domestic partnership registry, permitting registered couples to visit their partners in hospitals, nursing units, prisons, and mental health treatment facilities. It would grant partners the right to be notified in case of an emergency and to serve as their health care proxies, much as a spouse or other next-of-kin. In instances where there is no will after the death of a partner, the surviving partner would have custody of their remains for final need purposes.

Opponents of marriage equality say the measure is a thinly-disguised effort at creating recognition for same-sex relations and bestowing spousal rights upon gay couples and an attempt to circumvent Florida’s 2008 constitutional amendment that prohibits same-sex marriage and similar unions.

As we reported last month (Agenda, February 20, 2013: “State Senate Committee Stalls on Domestic Partnership Protection”), Sobel withdrew a more sweeping version of the legislation during the committee’s last session after the votes came up short. The Hollywood Democrat has since limited its parameters in an effort to garner wider support in the 10-member committee, which includes four Democrats and six Republicans.

Last month, State Sen. Nancy Detert (R-Venice) said she would vote against the legislation in committee, but as of Monday, March 11, Demert had apparently been satisfied enough by the new language to add her support, which would bring the vote to an even tie (5-5).

Sobel’s revised bill was written to bring it in line with existing local ordinances that permit domestic partnership registries, including those which apply in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties.

Opposition to the bill has been strong among religious and social conservatives. On Tuesday, the Florida Family Policy Council (FFPC) released “An Open Letter to the Florida Senate Children and Families Committee Regarding Domestic Partnerships,” which was addressed to Sobel and the committee members.

It said, “In summary, domestic partnerships are unnecessary, bad public policy, and are dangerous for a number of reasons that may not be immediately obvious.”

The letter said that “Domestic Partnerships are not merely unnecessary, but are affirmatively dangerous because they are used as legal weapons by gay rights activists to advance same-sex marriages.” It noted, “Historically, activist courts, at the urging of gay rights activists, have used domestic partnerships as a legal precedent for overriding traditional marriage laws and legalizing same-sex marriages.”

The letter, which was signed by FFPC President John Stemberger, railed against “homosexual marriages” that “deny children the right to either a mother or a father and are therefore not in the best interest of children. Same-sex marriage laws also force all other statutes in a state to become gender-neutral and impacts children’s educational curriculum and textbooks where homosexuality is promoted as natural and morally acceptable alternative to heterosexual marriage.”

Regardless whether the bill clears the Senate committee, it must pass muster through four more stages in the upper house of the legislature. Meanwhile, the State House version of the measure (HB 259), sponsored by State Rep. Mark Pafford (D-West Palm Beach) has yet to be brought before any relevant lower house committees.

A source close to the legislative process and intimate with the bill’s language told the Agenda that the vote would be “very close,” and the measure would likely either pass by a vote of 6-4, or “die on a [5-5] tie.”

The source, who asked not to be identified, said that support was being sought from two Republicans, State Sen. Thad Altman (R-Melbourne), and State Sen. Miguel de la Portilla (R-Miami). The absence of Thompson from Orlando effectively killed the momentum for approval, at least for the present.

Sobel offered her apologies to those LGBT advocates, including Michael Emanuel Rajner of Wilton Manors, who had come to the state capital to lobby in support of the domestic partnership bill.

The doctors, led by researchers from Johns Hopkins Children’s Center, say the baby, who was born in rural Mississippi, was treated aggressively—beginning about 30 hours after birth—with antiretroviral drugs, a procedure that normally does not take place.

If the report is confirmed, it would boost international support for research directed at finding a cure for HIV/AIDS, something that was thought to be virtually impossible only a few years ago. Some experts caution that the findings in a baby may not be relevant to adults.

The infant (whose name and gender were not disclosed) would be the world’s second well-documented case of a cure for HIV. The first was Timothy Brown, known as the “Berlin patient,” a leukemia patient who received a bone-marrow transplant from a donor who was genetically-resistant to HIV infection.

On Monday, March 4, Dr. Deborah Persaud, Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center and lead author of the report on the child, presented the researchers’ findings—which have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal—at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Atlanta.

According to Dr. Persaud, the child’s mother arrived at a Mississippi hospital already in labor during the fall of 2010, and gave birth prematurely. The mother had not seen a doctor during her pregnancy and was unaware that she was HIV-positive. The hospital transferred the baby, then approximately 30 hours old, to the University of Mississippi Medical Center, where Dr. Hannah Gay, an associate professor of pediatrics, ordered two blood tests for the presence of the HIV virus’ RNA and DNA.

Although a newborn with an infected mother is usually given one or two drugs as a preventive measure, Dr. Gay ordered a three-drug regimen devised for treatment, not prevention.

On Monday, the researchers presented five positive tests (four for viral RNA, and one for DNA) from the baby’s first month of life. The research indicates that once the treatment started, the HIV levels in the child’s blood declined in a pattern that is characteristic of infected patients.

With the treatment, virus levels rapidly declined and were undetectable by the time the newborn was a month old. When the baby was 18 months old, the mother stopped giving the baby drugs.

When she examined the child five months later, Dr. Gay tested the baby and the results were negative, although the pediatrician says she expected to see high viral loads in the baby.

Dr. Gay contacted researchers, including Dr. Persaud, who were conducting a study sponsored by the Foundation for AIDS Research. They put the baby through a battery of sophisticated tests, and found tiny amounts of viral genetic material, but no virus that is able to replicate.

On Monday, Dr. Persaud said there was little doubt that the baby—who is now 2 ½ years old—had experienced a “functional cure.” The child has reportedly been off drugs for a year and shows no signs of a functioning virus.

After the presentation, some experts suggested that the drugs given to the Mississippi baby killed off the virus before it could establish a hidden reservoir. The study findings could result in a new protocol for the immediate testing and treatment of newborns.

Transmission of the virus from mother to child is rare in the U.S. (with only about 200 reported cases a year), because infected mothers are typically treated during pregnancy.

But women in developing countries are less likely to be treated during pregnancy. And in Africa and other places that lack sophisticated testing, babies born to infected mothers are often not tested until after they are six weeks old.

In the past, there have been reported cases of babies clearing the virus, even with no treatment, including one reported in 1995 in The New England Journal of Medicine. But the tests have gotten more sophisticated in the past two decades. Studies are planned to see if early testing and aggressive treatment will now work for other babies.

The United Nations estimates that 330,000 babies were newly infected with HIV in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available, and that there are more than three million children globally living with HIV. If further research determines that the Mississippi treatment works in other babies, it will almost certainly be recommended internationally.

The bone marrow transplant that cured the Berlin patient, a middle-aged man, is a difficult and life-threatening procedure, but the Mississippi treatment is not, and its widespread application could lead to a new standard of care.

The document, which was also signed by four former state governors and two Members of Congress, reflects the growing rifts in the national Republican Party since its defeat in the November 2012 presidential election.

It will be submitted this week to the U.S. Supreme Court as an amicus (or “friend of the court”) brief in support of a lawsuit challenging Proposition 8, the California voter-approved ballot initiative that bans same-sex marriage, as well as all other similar prohibitions.

The high court will hear that challenge next month, along with a suit seeking to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the 1996 federal law that defines marriage as between one man and one woman. The justices are expected to deliver a decision sometime in June.

Experts say the brief has the potential to influence conservative justices in equal measure because of the legal arguments contained as well as for the influential names attached to it.

As of February 25, the names of current and former GOP officials, grandees, and ideologues included 75 individuals not normally associated with LGBT rights activism.

Meg Whitman, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Governor of California who supported Proposition 8, signed the brief, changing her previous position. Others who signed include Stephen Hadley, a National Security Adviser under George W. Bush, Bush Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, David Stockman, Director of the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan, U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Miami), and Ken Mehlman, the former Chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), who came out in August 2010, which made him one of the most prominent openly-gay figures in the Republican Party.

Mehlman serves on the board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, which brought the Proposition 8 suit. Reports have him spending the past several months lobbying fellow Republicans to garner support for the brief.

Former governors Jane Swift (Massachusetts), William Weld (Massachusetts), Christine Todd Whitman (New Jersey), and Jon Huntsman, Jr. (Utah) also signed. Huntsman—who supported civil unions but opposed gay marriage during his unsuccessful 2012 GOP presidential bid—last week wrote an article (“Marriage Equality Is a Conservative Cause”) in which he likewise re-examined his earlier opposition. (See the related story in this week’s Agenda NATION section, Page 11).

The Proposition 8 case already enjoys the backing of Theodore Olson, the former Bush Solicitor General who is also one of the suit’s two lead attorneys.

The brief—which was written by Reginald Brown, who worked in the Office of White House Counsel under George W. Bush and Seth Waxman, a Solicitor General under President Bill Clinton—contends that marriage equality fosters family values by allowing the children of same-sex couples to grow up in two-parent homes, advancing traditional (and conservative) values that include “limited government and maximizing individual freedom.”

This stands in stark contrast to the language contained in the RNC official platform, which supports amending the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as “the union of one man and one woman.”

The brief cites prior Supreme Court decisions that are popular with conservatives, including the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling that lifted campaign financing restrictions, and District of Columbia v. Heller, a 2008 Second Amendment ruling that overturned a law prohibiting handgun ownership.

The signers of the legal brief have placed themselves squarely against Boehner and rest of the House Republican leadership, which has approved the expenditure of tax dollars to defend DOMA.

In turn, those House leaders find themselves increasingly going against public attitudes towards marriage equality, which polls suggest have shifted dramatically in just the past 10 years.

In 2003, roughly a third of Americans said they supported same-sex marriage; today a majority favor it, while recent polls indicate that roughly 70 percent of voters under 30 years old support gay marriage. The strongest opposition is to be found in the geographic South.

Dean Trantalis, a longtime LGBT rights activist who served as co-chair of Americans for Equality, said the brief reflects a change in prevailing attitudes.

“The long-held grip on the American psyche is now dripping through the fingers of the right-wing,” he said. “Respect for individual freedom has always been an American ideal, Democrat or Republican.”

Trantalis, who in the mid-1990s worked successfully to enact and defend passage of Broward County’s Human Rights Ordinance, which prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation, and is now a candidate for Fort Lauderdale City Commission, applauded the strategy of “Changing hearts, then changing minds,” and asked, “[Fort Lauderdale] Mayor [Jack] Seiler, are you next?”

Writing in The American Conservative on February 21, Huntsman insisted that, “There is nothing conservative about denying other Americans the ability to forge a marriage with the person they love. All Americans should be treated equally by the law.”

In an editorial piece titled “Marriage Equality Is a Conservative Cause,” Huntsman called upon the political right “to take a hard look at what today’s conservatism stands for,” and said that supporting marriage equality for all Americans is “the right thing to do.”

He also sounded a cautionary note to his fellow Republicans, urging them to take a long hard look at its unilateral stance against marriage rights. “The American people will not hear us out if we stand against their friends, family, and individual liberty,” Huntsman predicted.

“Marriage is not an issue that people rationalize through the abstract lens of the law; rather it is something understood emotionally through one’s own experience with family, neighbors, and friends,” Huntsman wrote. “The party of Lincoln should stand with our best tradition of equality and support full civil marriage for all Americans.”

A member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormon Huntsman was elected to two terms as chief executive of the Beehive State before resigning to serve as U.S. Ambassador to China under President Obama.

As Governor of Utah, he supported civil unions, but acknowledged on Thursday he believed that designation to be a first step towards full civil rights for LGBT Americans.

“Civil unions, I believed, were a practical step that would bring all citizens more fully into the fabric of a state they already were—and always had been—a part of,” Huntsman wrote. “That was four years ago. Today we have an opportunity to do more: conservatives should start to lead again and push their states to join the nine others that allow all their citizens to marry.”

Former WPTV Channel 5 weatherman Robert J. Lopicola, 42, is scheduled to return to court for a June 14 appearance, with his trial set to begin the week of June 24. Lopicola was arrested last July after two teenage boys told authorities that, sometime between August 2010 and January 2011, they had engaged in sexual activity with Lopicola, whom they met through Craigslist ads.

As we first reported last year (Florida Agenda, July 11, 2012, COVER, “Wilton Manors Man Arrested for Sex with Minors: Former TV Weatherman Rob Lopicola Taken by U.S. Marshals”), one of the boys allegedly victimized by Lopicola, a Boca Raton resident, was 15 years old while the other, from West Palm Beach, was 17 at the time.

According to prosecutors, the first boy, now 16, reported the battery after he moved to live with his uncle in Michigan. Arrest documents say that he was initially reluctant to report the alleged sex, but told Michigan authorities he believed Lopicola would hurt others if he didn’t come forward.

As we reported in 2012, Lopicola was employed at West Palm Beach television station WPBT Channel 5 for eight years, but abruptly resigned from his job in 2006 without explanation. According to a 2009 Palm Beach Post blog post concerning “his mysterious departure,” from the station, “there was no cake, no two weeks’ notice” to commemorate his leaving after almost a decade on the air.

Lopicola, who was employed as a supervisor of the dancers at the Boardwalk Bar in Fort Lauderdale, moved to Wilton Manors in 2011, and was regularly seen on Wilton Drive, power-walking and performing push-ups on the corner near his house on Northeast 7th Avenue.

Court documents indicate that the first teen who met Lopicola online had lied about his age, claiming at first to be 18 years old, but that he later admitted to Lopicola that he was 15. The arrest report alleges that the two had a physical sexual encounter in Lopicola’s car near the teen’s home, and that say that after he moved to Farmington Hills, Michigan, the boy complied with requests from Lopicola to text nude pictures of himself. The teen told investigators, “Robert probably likes real young boys, and would hurt others if [the alleged victim] didn’t’ tell.”

The arrest report graphically describes the alleged encounters with both boys (who were born in 1993 and 1995, respectively), and says that Lopicola’s other victim was a then-17-year-old high school junior living in West Palm Beach. Prosecutors say that when the mother of the second teen,

Wilton Manors Man Defrauded many LGBT Investors

WILTON MANORS – Last week, in what sounded more like a whimper than a bang, accused Ponzi schemer Jim Ellis pleaded guilty to charges that he had solicited over a dozen investors since 2004 with the intent to defraud them.

Appearing before Judge Kathleen Williams in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, Ellis

Pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and could be subjected to hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Ellis is likely to receive a reduced penalty when he is sentenced on April 11, based upon his cooperation with investigators in the case against the Ponzi scheme’s alleged mastermind, George Elia.

As we first reported last spring (Florida Agenda, April 12, 2012, COVER, “Federal Authorities Detail Complaint against Oakland Park man charged in $11 Million Ponzi Scheme: ‘Rainmaker’ alleged to have Bilked Million$ from Wilton Manors Residents”), Elia—who was arrested on March 27, 2012 in Las Vegas—is believed to have bilked as much as $11 million from victims, many of them gay retirees living in Wilton Manors.

The federal charges against Ellis said that he falsely represented investing at least $5 million of his own money with Elia, money he claimed to have inherited from his parents. Ellis further told prospective marks that he had earned between 16 to 20 percent in annual returns, about $20,000 to $24,000 per month.

SEC investigators say that when Ellis made those representations, his net worth was about $200,000, and that there was no evidence he inherited an estate from his parents. Records indicate that businesses owned by George Elia paid Ellis more than $2.1 million between 2004 and 2011, but federal investigators said the payments were not actual investment returns.

In a strange—and uniquely gay—twist to the proceedings against Elia, last month Assistant U.S. Attorney H. Ron Davison filed a motion asking the court to prohibit Elia’s attorneys from preemptively excluding gay jurors from deciding his case.

In his argument, the prosecutor noted that, “George Elia was an equal opportunity con man,” and the sexual identity of prospective jurors should have no bearing upon their ability to render a fair and unbiased verdict. “Sexual orientation should be treated like race, gender, and ethnicity for purposes” of jury selection, Davison argued.