Peter's Place

I choose to be unstoppable. I am bigger than my concerns and worries. The strength of others inspires me daily. I focus on my goals. I trust my intuition and live a courageous life! As of today, 1 January 2016, I no longer am associated with the Bronx LGBTQ Center and have severed all ties to the organization. I shared this news with some of my closest friends about two weeks ago. I am the last of the co-founders to leave the Center, 3.5 years after it started -- which is fitting in a way as I was perhaps the first to organize the new organization. Having served as the Board Secretary since the Center's incorporation on 19 September 2012, my decision not to run for re-election and continue my tenure as an officer on the board of directors was announced at the annual membership meeting on 14 December 2015. This decision did not come lightly but leaves me time to work on projects that are bringing positive energy into my life. Of all the accomplishments during my te...

There's probably more things to do for free in New York City than anywhere else in the world. NYC's own tourism web site compiles a "best of free" list that is regularly updated: http://www.nycgo.com/free/ This list of 40 Free Things To Do In NYC leaves out the fact that admission to the *Metropolitan Museum of Art* is a suggestion donation, or "pay what you want," as are many of the City's arts museums: http://www.lonelyplanet.com/usa/travel-tips-and-articles/76493 Everyone from the National Geographic, which has this list of some of the best free things to do in NYC: http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/city-guides/free-new-york-city-traveler/ -- to the Disney-owned site Babble, has a list of free things to do in the world's greatest city: http://www.babble.com/travel/25-free-things-to-do-in-new-york-city/#25-museums-attractions-in-new-york-that-wont-cost-a-dime And those who have the pleasure of visiting this great global treasur...

Over the past few months, I have carefully been considering the 2013 New York City mayoral race and examining the candidates who are seeking office. I reserved making a decision about whom I would support until I had invested enough time to examine and try to work with all of the candidates. Most importantly to me as an LGBTQ-rights activist, NYC Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn has stood out among the candidates as standing by the LGBTQ community, and I believe that she will continue to do so. Not many know about this but Quinn has laid out a plan for LGBTQ residents of NYC : Establish a Mayor’s Office of HIV/AIDS Policy Ensure That No Young Person in New York Has to Spend the Night on the Streets Build New York City’s First LGBT Senior Housing Community Make Sure City Agencies Effectively Serve all LGBT New Yorkers Redouble Efforts to Combat Hate Crimes and Promote Tolerance Quinn's plan and support for the LGBTQ community, laid out in more detail on her web site...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE On Saturday, July 14, 2012, a fundraiser was held to assist with efforts to raise the nearly $5,000 in funds needed to pay for various NYC permits required to stage  Bronx   Pride  2012 , an LGBT  pride  festival, celebration, and rally that will be held on  Saturday, July 21, 2012  at  Crotona Park  in The  Bronx  from  noon until 6 pm . Donations to help pay the NYC permit fees are being accepted on the Eventbrite page created for the  pride  event at  http://bronxpride2012.eventbrite.com/ . Additionally, orders for official  Bronx   Pride  2012 T-shirts, with personalization options, are being taken. All orders will be available for pick up at  Bronx   Pride  on Saturday. Due to the financial straits everyone is in, we will only be producing T-shirts for people who order them in advance, through Eventbrite. More importantly, attendees at the fun...

There's a story that's been going around lately, and it's pretty true, that a bunch of Muslim women were recently arrested at the Playland Amusement Park in Rye, New York (which is owned by the Westchester County Government --the only amusement park in the nation so owned by a governmental entity ), for causing a disturbance and protesting the park's refusal to allow them entrance on the park's many rides while wearing their headgear. Being a life-long resident of Westchester County and friends with folks who've worked at Playland over the years, I have an issue with this entire story. It's being made out that the Muslim women were singled out, and that's just not the case. Here's the fact of the matter: Anyone wearing any sort of headgear, including scarves, is not permitted on any ride at Playland, for safety reasons: If the women were allowed onto the rides and one of them were choked to death because their scarf (their headgear) ...

{EAV_BLOG_VER:50d9bce121877b1b} [EDIT 4 June 2011: Please ignore the first line of this post; I'm having to do some technical stuff with which you need not be concerned...] I just faxed the following letter to the management company of the apartment building I've been living in for almost six months now: I write to advise you of an incident that just occurred at my apartment door. Approximately 15 minutes ago at around 2:45 a.m., a woman began banging on my door almost to the point of knocking it down. She complained that I was making too much noise. For the first time since I moved into my apartment XX at XXX, a friend came over to help me unpack. As you are aware, I previously have been unable to unpack because the movers stacked everything from my previous apartment to the point where I was physically unable to move anything, due to my physical handicaps. The woman complained that she’s sick and tired of me sliding things around back and forth and moving things aro...

Some thoughts were just running through my mind and I thought I'd share them, to see what others think. I'd recently been accused of being "one of those arrogant, rude New Yorkers" and so I've been focused on why this misconception of New Yorkers being rude and obnoxious has come about and it has lead me to the exact opposite conclusion: New Yorkers are, by and far, more friendly and more intimate with each other than citizens of other big cities and small towns alike, because they've taken the time to get to know one another through assimilation. Being The Center of the World has its advantages (there are so many things to do!) and its disadvantages (there are so many things to do!). Because of this, New Yorkers are perennially wandering about from place to place and from event to event, to get to that "next thing to do" that's on their "list" (virtual or stone tablet). With all this running, walking, jogging, skating, biking...

I wrote this on 30 March 2010 but just haven’t had a chance to post it until now. But then, something happened today (a few conversations with a few different TweePALs) that made my memory job back a few months and remember what I had written, and realize that now would be a great time to finally get this up on my blog: I had to go into the City today and forgot to bring a book along with me to read on the train ride. While the ride isn’t that long (50-minutes tops, from my sister's home) it’s long enough to get through a few chapters of a good book. I did, however, have my trusty laptop computer with me so I’ve brought it out as the train is departing and am just going to write down some of my thoughts until a few minutes before my stop, when I’ll have to start the process of hibernating the computer (it takes a few minutes to go into hibernation mode because writing 3,221,225,472 bytes (3GB) of data to a hard disk drive – no matter the speed and/or interface – still takes a...

I have just sent the following Letter to the Editors via e-mail: Westchester-Putnam Letters to the Editor The Journal News 1 Gannett Drive White Plains, NY 10604 To the Editors: I recently blogged about the severe fiscal crisis in which the State of New York has found itself . Various state agencies' bills are not being paid and as a result, they are losing services. In particular, the Office of Mental Health is set to lose all of their administrative and support staff as of 1 April 2010 as the entirety of such staff is employed through a temporary employment agency, whose contract has not been renewed by the state. There are rumors abound that state income tax refunds are being withheld until as long as the fall -- refunds that many people are relying upon. Local governments and school districts are still waiting for payments owed to them by NYS . Under New York State law, a Writ of Mandamus can be issued under an Article 78 Proceeding to "compel a government ag...

Every Sunday around midnight, for more than the past two years, I've logged into the New York State Unemployment Insurance web site to certify my weekly claim for unemployment benefits (my whopping $60/week!). This past weekend, around midnight on Sunday, I logged into the web site without any difficulty. When I attempted to certify my weekly claim, as I had always done, I was advised that the site was experiencing technical difficulties and could not be access at that time. I tried, for the first time ever, to certify my weekly claim by calling in to the NYS Unemployment Office Certification number. I got up to the point where I choose the option to certify my weekly claim, and was advised that my request could not be completed at that time due to "technical difficulties." When I am able to certify my weekly claim before noon on Sunday, I receive my money on my debit card (issued by NYS thru Chase bank) very late Monday night. If I complete my weekly unemployment certifi...

Approximately one decade ago, Westchester County (where I live) was debating the passage of legislation that would establish its own Human Rights Law/Commission. The proposed legislation was extremely controversial because it included "sexual orientation" as a protected class--something the New York State law did not do at the time. As someone who has been politically involved since high school and active in the LGBTQ rights movement, I wrote a letter to the editors of our local newspaper in support of the passage of the county's proposed Human Rights Law. For whatever reason, somewhere around 90% of the letters to editors that I write actually get published, and this was no exception. My letter appeared in the local paper, signed with my name and village of residence. My grandmother, very frail of health (at that time she'd had four major coronary infarctions and a series of minor strokes, along with the usual health problems associated with someone approach...

Today, 10 September 2009, is World Suicide Prevention Day . I am a suicide survivor. My first attempt was made when I was a teenager, because I couldn't come to terms with being gay and being Catholic. I just responded to someone on Facebook who inquired about this. Here's what I wrote: I was raised in a very conservative, very religious Catholic Democratic household, by my very religious, very conservative Democratic Grandparents . I didn't know that there were gay people growing up. Then I started going on-line, and I met my first gay person, my Unca Uni . He got me to realize that all the fantasies/what not I'd been having were b/c I was gay. I couldn't reconcile being Catholic with being gay. One night, whilst on the phone w/ a fellow young Republican from Yonkers, I came out to him. I was also taking sleeping pills. But having led an extremely sheltered life, I didn't know that you're supposed to take the whole bottle all at once, not one at a time (wh...

[EDIT 29 June 2009] I've been thinking about this after finishing the blog post below, and there are a bunch of different ways I could have titled this other than "40 Years After Stonewall, Where Do We Stand?" Another title could be "Small Strides Made 85 Years Into the LGBT Civil Rights Movement" and yet another could be "We're still being killed millennia later, although it may no longer be legal in some jurisdictions." Still, another title could be "LGBT folk can't legally be killed in the USA, which is great progress, but what about places where Sharia is the rule of law?" So with that in mind, continue on to the article that I wrote yesterday and just remember that while it's against the law to murder a person of LGBT origin in the United States of America, that isn't necessarily the case around the world. [/EDIT] Forty years ago today, 28 June 1969, a firecracker was lit under the seats of gay (and when I say gay, I'...