Source: Kim Rogerson / Getty Trans Woman Wins In Court After Brooklyn Landlord Humiliates Her After being humiliated during the apartment hunting process, Giana Desir is finally getting a tiny bit of justice. According to reports, Desir is a trans woman who began transitioning back in 2013. Two years later, her landlord all but kicked her out when he refused to renew her lease in October 2015. Another Brooklyn landlord, then told Desir he could maybe find a BASEMENT apartment somewhere …because, according to him, she shouldn’t be around “people and children.” From The NYDailyNews : At the same time, Desir’s friend “Jazz,” who lived in a different building, told her apartments were available. Yet when she finally spoke in person to Walter, the landlord there, he balked, [law judge John] Spooner wrote. Showing up at his office, he seemed “shocked and surprised” and asked, “‘Why didn’t you tell me you were transgender? Thank God, I had you come here at night. What would people have thought if they had seen you,’” he said, Spooner wrote of the humiliating exchange. Walter then said he couldn’t possibly rent Desir an apartment “around people and children,” but could find her a place “in a basement somewhere with its own entrance” and not “around too many people.” He also worried he’d be thought of as allowing a sexual encounter with Desir if he were to rent to her, and even suggested she stop the transitioning until she landed an apartment, telling her that she “’would look really crazy,’” Spooner wrote. Desir ultimately found an apartment through welfare benefits, but said her sense of independence was shattered and that Walter’s comments were “devastating.” Walter wasn’t the only one to treat her that way — at least 5 landlords refused her housing. In a moment of victory, however, she’s been awarded $25,000. Spooner recommended a compensatory fine of $15,000 and a civil penalty of $10,000, and ”that respondents be ordered to undergo anti-discrimination training” in his decision. “Based on the trial trial evidence, I find that respondents violated … (the City Human Rights Law) by discriminating against the complainant by denying her rental apartments because she is transgender,” Spooner wrote. Desir says folks like to put trans people under a “huge umbrella of negativity,” adding that it “felt good” to do something. “I didn’t realize how difficult it would be … emotions fade, memories fade, and it’s unfair the process and the length of the process you have to go through,” she said, according to the site. We’re wishing her the best of luck. Salute!!
Well this will surely keep Friday nights in Atlanta turned up… Guns In Bars Bill Passes In GA Georgia residents can now stay strapped while they get slizzed. A new bill that went into effect on Tuesday allows licensed gun-toters to bring their weaponry basically everywhere they go. Via TheDailyBeast : “Doing shots” in Georgia bars may have a whole new meaning when HB60 goes into effect Tuesday. The Safe Carry Protection Act, also known as the “guns everywhere bill,” broadly expands the places where Georgians can carry firearms to include municipal buildings, public libraries, schools, churches, unsecured areas of airports, and bars. While churches and schools have to opt in to the law for the expanded carry provisions to apply to them, bar owners must opt out of the legislation by posting a “no-guns” sign or removing heat-packing patrons themselves. “The onus is now on the bar owner,” said Alisa Cleek, a partner with Elarbee Thompson law firm in Atlanta who co-chairs the firm’s restaurant advisory group. “If you don’t want weapons on your premises you have to take steps to make sure customers know that. You don’t get to sit back this time.” Among the handful of bars that knew the bill had passed and would go live Tuesday, all brought up the obvious problems of having guns in the same place where people would be drinking, in some cases heavily, late into the night. “The gun prohibitionists are real good at blowing everything out of proportion,” Henry said, pointing to activists’ dire predictions several years ago when Georgia legalized guns in restaurants. “They said servers would get shot if a steak was too rare or there would be a gun draw over the last chicken wing. It just hasn’t happened and it’s not going to happen this time.” But Piyali Cole, the head of the Georgia chapter of Moms Demand Action, which opposed the bill, said the new language allowing guns in bars will make Georgians less safe and pointed to a recent string of fights leading to shootouts in Georgia parking lots as an example. We’re not sure why the average person would feel the need to tote their gun to the bar in the first place…and we’re sure you’ve seen firsthand how normal discussions escalate to all-out brawls when liquor is involved. Is it really safe to throw firearms into the mix? Then again…if you know everyone else has one, is it your best bet to bring your weapon as well? Maybe everyone should just stay at home. SMH. The Daily Beast
This is so sad … Dallas Man Murders High School Basketball Star Over Video Game Via The Grio reports: Jonathan Tramaine Turner, 19, was indicted Monday by a Dallas County grand jury in connection with the fatal beating of 18-year-old high school basketball star Troy Causey. The fight between the teens started over a video game, reports NBC Dallas-Fort Worth. “There’s a pain that feels like someone is drilling a hole in your stomach,” Causey’s mother Tammy Simpson told NBC after she found out Turner would only face manslaughter in lieu of a murder charge. “When they said that I just sank.” Turner and Causey lived together at the time of the altercation. According to authorities, Turner claims to have hit Causey, causing him to fall to the ground and hit his head. Police determined that account was not consistent with the results from the Dallas County Medical Examiner, Dr. Ventura, M.D., who stated, “this kind of skull fracture could not have been caused by the complainant striking the ground.” Causey’s mother believes there are more people, those who were present during the fight, who are also responsible for her son’s death. Whatever that was it was about more than a video game. The game was probably just the trigger. Rest in peace to this young man!
Trey wasn’t acting very gentlemanly at the gentleman’s club! Via TMZ reports : Throwing dollar bills at a woman (aka MAKING IT RAIN!!!) seems harmless, but it got Trey Songz arrested for assault in New York recently … TMZ has learned. Songz (real name Tremaine Neverson) had an album release party on August 21 at a gentleman’s club in Queens. According to police, somewhere between 4:00 and 4:15 AM on the 22nd, Trey became involved in an altercation inside the club. Cops described the incident this way in the criminal complaint: “Tremaine Neverson, did throw a sum of United States currency at the complainant and said sum of United States currency struck the complainant’s left eye causing substantial pain to her left eye.” It is unclear if the woman in question was … how do we say this nicely … a dancer. Songz was not arrested that night, but rather a month later for misdemeanor assault. Songz had a court date in NY on November 1 and an order of protection was issued. He is due back in court in February. Sounds like Tremaine got confused. Doesn’t he know you’re supposed to slap the dancer on the azz with the money? Wrong end honey! This sure ain’t gonna help those gay rumors go away.
About 20 minutes into a 3-D press screening of The Avengers Monday night in Los Angeles, one member of the audience interrupted the superhero theatrics to make it known that all was not right with his viewing experience. “Fix the projector!” the exasperated gentleman bellowed during a conspicuously quiet moment, as Mark Ruffalo ’s contemplative face filled the screen. Something was very off, giving the complainant and others in attendance a less-than-ideal, even disastrous presentation. The only problem? There was nothing wrong with the projector. The issue that led this particular fed up gentleman — who may or may not have been a film critic on assignment, I’m not sure – to shout out in irritated frustration wasn’t any fault of shoddy projection, or texting teens, or (forbid!) an accidental digital file deletion up in the booth, or any of the common complaints audiences have in the age of modern moviegoing. It was a case of faulty 3-D glasses mucking up the picture for the poor guy, giving Joss Whedon’s ZOMG epic 3-D adventure an unsolicited layer of blurriness, blackouts, green tint and/or other visual muck — only he didn’t realize that it was because of the cumbersome contraption on his face and not the projection itself. I know this because about 10 seconds into The Avengers , I realized my pair of theater-provided 3-D glasses were also inoperable — and then spent 15 minutes running back and forth from lobby to darkened theater aisle, sorting through literally dozens of pairs in a frantic attempt to find ones that worked so I could get back to watching Hulk and Co. smash, already. Now, a brief techie aside: The Arclight theaters, which hosted the screening in Hollywood, employ the XpandD active-shutter kind of 3-D glasses — they’re the heavier ones with the rubberized frames and the just-cleaned wet spots, weighty because the active-shutters in each pair are synced to an infrared signal broadcast in the theater which switch alternate right — and left-eye images at high speeds and require batteries. (The alternate kind of 3-D glasses, passive glasses, use polarized lenses and tend to be those lightweight, disposable, hipster-looking shades; these were used at the incident-free Avengers ’ L.A. premiere last month at Grauman’s Chinese, but the Arclight cinemas are XpanD partners.) So the Arclight’s active-shutter glasses were causing a major malfunction for us unlucky attendees who’d grabbed bunk pairs on our ways to our seats. And the exasperated gentleman and I were not alone. In my journeys up and down the hallway I saw many fellow would-be Avengers -watchers doing as I was, all of us locked in a comically desperate dance of grabbing glasses, testing them, returning defeated. Trays upon trays of fresh 3-D glasses were laid out in front of us by the bewildered theater staff, who quickly retired their “These should be working” auto-reply and let us seize handfuls of the damned things at a time. (The Arclight Cinemas declined to comment for this article, by the way.) Critic/journalist Fred Topel , who’d been in the same boat, tweeted about the snafu that night along with an explanation he’d received from the theater manager later, after it had been fixed: @ arclightcinemas 3D glasses broke tonight. Some stayed blurry, some blacked out one of the eyes. I tried 7 before I got one that worked.— Fred Topel (@FredTopel) May 01, 2012 @ Arclightcinemas manager Joshua said they fixed the broken 3D by adding a second emitter in the booth.— Fred Topel (@FredTopel) May 01, 2012 Topel managed to find a working pair before too long, but others weren’t as lucky; of the handfuls of folks I saw leaving their seats to hunt down working 3-D glasses, some, like Screen International critic Brent Simon, gave up the search when he’d decided too much movie had gone by to return to his seat. “My glasses had in-and-out image flickering, one of them went black, and then I had massive green tinting on one pair — sort of like Hulk vision?” he told Movieline. “I tried watching with no glasses for a while, but that was problematic.” After 15 minutes of attempting unsuccessfully to find a working pair, Simon decided he’d have to see the film from the start another time, and left. But unlike those who’d exited altogether or managed to eventually find a working pair, there were the untold folks who, like our exasperated gentleman, either never realized the glasses were the problem or that they’d have to leave their seat and miss parts of the film in order to find a fix. “I had a good vantage point from where I was sitting of how many people were coming back and forth, streaming down the aisles,” said Simon, “and some people were just watching without their glasses.” If you’ve ever watched 3-D without 3-D glasses, you know that watching a film for any amount of time with that kind of consistent blurriness would totally suck. So is every 3-D release worth the potential hassle? Or worth the potential risk ? I’ll put this out there: The Avengers does not need to be seen in 3-D. For starters, it contains a number of scenes that are dark and dimly lit to begin with, notwithstanding the added dimness that most 3-D post-conversions usually suffer. (For example: The entire opening sequence is composed of nighttime action shots that are frustratingly hard to make out.) At moments I glimpsed the screen sans 3-D glasses and the film was brighter, crisper, much more vivid, even gorgeous, and if not for the blurriness of the third dimension I’d have preferred to watch it that way. Whedon seems to have shot for immersive 3-D rather than gimmicky 3-D, which is fine and all, but overall the added dimension doesn’t add that much. If I were to recommend The Avengers to anyone, I’d wholeheartedly push them toward 2-D. Besides, to be in a 3-D film and not get the full 3-D effect — or worse, to sit through a blurry presentation without even realizing something was wrong — would defeat the point entirely. And if 3-D isn’t an essential or notable enhancement to a film, why bother? Just remember: In our brave new world of 3-D dominance, we are all, potentially, that exasperated gentleman. How many of us might continue to sit there, watching through broken glasses, unaware of why the picture was so darn fuzzy? But 3-D continues to be pushed upon us, and while Monday’s minor debacle was just one isolated incident of the technology revolting against its bearer, I simply offer it up as anecdotal evidence of a bump in the road to our moviegoing future; take from this what lessons you will if you see The Avengers in 3-D this weekend. Just don’t rush to blame the blurry curves of ScarJo’s Black Widow getup on the projector. Follow Jen Yamato on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
