The Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau has rolled out what it says is the world’s first travel marketing campaign to feature transgender models. The three models will be used in campaigns directed to both mainstream and LGBTQ media outlets.
The campaign, which also features straight, gay and lesbian models, marks the destination’s latest outreach to the LGBTQ community and is designed to bolster its image as an authentic, diverse and inclusive brand.
The campaign premiered in New York’s Times Square on New Year’s Eve with a billboard video featuring Isabella Santiago, a Venezuelan model and 2014 Miss World Transgender. Viewed by millions, the video was part of the backdrop to city’s New Year’s Eve ball drop.
By Megan Padilla – Full Story at Travel Weekly
Fort Lauderdale Gay Travel Resources
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Sherry Donegan of Fresno, Calif., had never taken a cruise before when she joined 17 others last month aboard the Royal Caribbean Brilliance of the Seas for a six-day vacation. But a comment from an anti-LGBT employee aboard the ship and being relegated to the back of a ballroom certainly didn’t make a good first impression.
Donegan is transgender, and her group consisted of trans women, men, and allies. On her second night, a bartender turned her away, telling her, “We don’t serve fags here,” she told the Bay Area Reporter.
Donegan filed a complaint aboard ship and two days later was told that employee had been fired and put off the ship in Mexico. She told the Reporter she doesn’t believe Royal Caribbean, which recently scored a perfect 100 on the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index for the second year in a row.
Irpinia contradicts everything you expect about Southern Italy. The rainy climate and green mountains have more in common with the Pacific Northwest than the Amalfi Coast, just 40 miles away. Instead of Roman ruins like those at Pompeii, stones remain from the Osci, the native Campanian tribe known for their salacious festivals. The spiritual center of the region is the famously hard-to-reach church at Montevergine.
Pilgrims arrive after long bus rides over highways that span seemingly bottomless gorges. Irpinia’s landscape is foreboding, which is why the Montevergine pilgrimage has always required strong and focused devotion. The thin air is hard to breathe. The damp stone from the mountain’s peaks perfume the air with ancient minerals.
In the cleared piazza, old women sell candles and chestnuts, but the attention belongs to the crowds of dancing men and women beating tambourines and clapping out ancient rhythms with castanets. If you took away the down coats and wool hats, the scene would look like it inspired one of the ancient mosaics on display at the archaeological museum in nearby Naples.
Energy builds among the devotees who pray and sing as the faithful have done here since the thirteenth century. But on February 2nd devotees wear lipstick and stubble and feather boas. By the time night descends, over two thousand gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender pilgrims will have passed through this Catholic shrine to worship the icon they call the ‘Madonna of Transformation.’
A transgender passenger has said he was humiliated and demeaned when he was forced to remove his prosthetic penis by airline staff.
Subjected to a full body scan, an Australian airport staff member donned two pairs of gloves to handle the penis, saying: ‘You want me to touch that thing with my bare hands?’
This incident, which took place in 2015, is the subject of a complaint made via the National LGBTI Health Alliance to a Senate committee inquiry on airport and aviation security.