News: Chevy Volt delivers shock in “coming out” ad

Chevy Volt comes out in ad for Motor City PrideLesbian.com, June 7, 2012

The Chevy Volt came out just in time for Motor City Pride. The eco-friendly auto shared the news with his older model parents in an ad featured in “Between the Lines,” a Detroit-based newspaper for the city’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.

The whimsical new ad, which appeared shortly before last weekend’s Detroit Pride celebration, features the text, “Volt runs on an electric battery and a gas generator. So, whatever revs your engine, we support you 100 percent. Happy Motor City Pride from the entire Chevrolet family.”

Noting that LGBT shoppers tend to be significantly more eco-friendly than the rest of the population “The Car Connection” hails the ad as a particularly strategic move for the car manufacturer.

“Chevrolet has managed to find an interesting parallel between one of its ‘outsider’ products and a population that, in some ways, still resides on the margins of society,” the report states. “That’s not just clever, but it makes for good advertising.”

Wade Davis opens up about life as a gay man in the NFL
In his first interviews since coming out last year, former cornerback Wade Davis spoke publicly about his challenges as a gay man in the NFL. The 34-year-old talked with both SB Nation and Outsports about his experiences with the Tennessee Titans, Seattle Seahawks and Washington Redskins.

Though the idea of having an openly gay man in the locker room may make other heterosexual players uncomfortable, Davis notes, “At never a point [during] my NFL playing career did I take advantage of the privilege that I had to see a man naked. I never even remotely got aroused in the locker room.” He explained his reasoning in further detail to Out Sports, “You just want to be one of the guys, and you don’t want to lose that sense of family. Your biggest fear is that you’ll lose that camaraderie and family.”

Davis equated the process of publicly coming out to “taking a scab off of my entire body as aggressively, as physically, as horrible as I can. I bleed in the best kind of way but also in the worst kind of way because I bled alone.” Davis went through with it, though, because he said he “started to realize that there’s an opportunity here to really make and effect change not only with myself but in the world.”

Davis now works at the Hetrick-Martin Institute which serves the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or questioning your in New York City.

The high cost of being gay
As the campaign continues in the struggle for LGBT rights, many note that gay couples face far greater financial obstacles than do their heterosexual counterparts. The incongruity between state and federal law produced by the 1996 Defense of Marriage act created double worlds for gay married couples in almost every aspect of their financial lives.

Whether in regard to divorce, estate planning or filing tax returns married gay couples often face increased expense and paperwork.

“A lot of gay couples are getting married because they can, not because they’ve thought through the legal consequences,” said Larry Jacobs, a Rockville, Maryland, estate and trust attorney specializing in same-sex couples. Jacobs often discusses pre- and post-nuptial agreements with clients to sidestep these knots.

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