National Gaze

New York’s LGBT anti-violence project is offering assistance to investigators seeking to solve 10 deaths that may involve one or two serial killers stalking workers in the sex trade.

The New York City Anti-Violence Project announced in mid-September that their experts were reaching out to the Suffolk County, N.Y., Police Department after learning that at least one victim may have identified as transgender.

“Don’t ask, don’t tell” officially ended at 12:01 a.m. on Sept. 20, a date greeted like a holiday by the politicians and activists who fought for repeal, by gay servicemembers who were forced into the closet, and by military veterans who felt disrespected.

North Carolina business CEOs, civil rights activists, progressive politicians and vexed voters are uniting to defeat a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

The measure also would bar any state recognition of civil unions and domestic partnerships.

A massive survey shows that social networks increasingly are an effective way to reach LGBT consumers.

The fifth annual LGBT Community Survey, conducted by Community Marketing Inc., involved a partnership with 150 organizations, websites and publications and the polling of 30,000 people.

Democratic lawmakers in the House and Senate recently introduced legislation to extend federal civil rights protections in housing and credit to individuals, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or source of income.

In the U.S. House, Jerrold Nadler and Edolphus Towns of New York and John Conyers of Michigan introduced the Housing Opportunities Made Equal or HOME Act. Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry introduced the companion bill in the U.S. Senate.

Police are investigating whether criminal charges should be filed after the suicide of a 14-year-old New York boy who had complained in an online video about being bullied over his sexuality and who often alluded on his blog to killing himself.

Officials in the Williamsville school district near Buffalo said they are cooperating with the investigation into the death of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer, who had started his freshman year of high school less than two weeks before he died.

The federal government has issued a new prescription for protecting LGBT patients’ rights to hospitals enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid programs.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently relayed new guidelines to hospitals that support enforcement of rules protecting patients’ right to choose their own visitors during a hospital stay. The guidance was developed to guarantee that a patient’s domestic partner is not barred from the hospital room because there is no blood relationship or marriage license.