ISSN: 2372-2207

October 2015 Suggested Retail Price $2.95

Greg Scarnici

Photo Credit: Thought Catalog Digital

One of comedy’sbiggest freaks

2 Diversity Rules MagazineOctober 2015

My Two CentsBy Jim Koury, Editor

Inside This Issue (partial listing) David-Elijah Nahmod ...................................... Page 3 Comedy’s Biggest Freak .................................... Page 4 Kristen MacKenzie ........................................... Page 9 Halloween - Gay Holiday? ............................... Page 10 Amazon Trail .................................................... Page 11 A Reunion ......................................................... Page 14 Autumn Travel .................................................. Page 16 Heading to Kauai .............................................. Page 17 Resources and Diversions .................................. Page 22

Welcome to the October issue of Diversity Rules Magazine! The October issue is an exciting one for a couple of reasons!

First, I am so psyched to have our guest feature interviewee, Greg Scarnici, be part of the Diversity Rules family. What an awesome and talented indivicual and he comes to us compliments of the fine folks at Project Publicity.

Greg is a comedic artist and musi-cian, whose music video and com-mercial parodies have been viewed over 10 million times on YouTube and a host of other sites. His work has also been featured on MTV, VH1, Fox News and CNN. He also is an Associate Producer with Saturday Night Live.

He has just recently released his first memoir entitled, “I Hope My Mother Doesn’t See This.” We are psyched to have him in the pages

of Diversity Rules Magazine.

The second exciting happening in October is the unveiling of a new website. By the time this issue hits the cyber airwaves, the website will have been unveiled. Many thanks to the fine folks at asdf Solutions for their dedicated and awesome work! It certainly is a turning point in the history of Diversity Rules Magazine.

This month’s issue features many fine writers and articles of inter-est. I hope you enjoy the issue and spread the word about Diversity Rules Magazine. There are some exciting times coming and to-gether we will ride the wave and watch things unfold. Stay tuned for some other surprises over the coming months.

Summer has passed and fall is upon us. Enjoy your fall and see you all soon.

Diversity Rules MagazinePO Box 72

Oneonta, NY 13820James R. Koury, Editor/Publisher

607.435.1587

Websitewww.diversityrulesmagazine.com

Blogwww.diversityrulesmagazine.blogspot.com

E-Mailgeneralinfo@diversityrulesmagazine.com

Copyright 2015 Diversity Rules MagazineAll Rights Reserved

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If you have a question or comment regard-ing this issue or future issues of Diversity Rules Magazine, the publisher would love to hear from you! Feel free to contact Di-versity Rules using the e-mail above or mailing address listed above. Content sub-mission are always welcome too!

All submissions become the property of Diversity Rules Magazine. However, origi-nating authors reserve all rights to their creative works.

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3Diversity Rules MagazineOctober 2015

David-Elijah Nah-mod is a film crit-ic and reporter in San Francisco. His articles ap-pear regularly in The Bay Area Reporter and SF

Weekly. You can also find him on Facebook and Twitter.

David developed Post Traumatic Syndrome Disor-der (PTSD) after surviving gay conversion therapy as a child and has found that many in the LGBT community suffer from severe, often untreated emotional disorders due to the extreme anti-gay traumas they endured. This column chronicles his journey.

So I’m back in therapy. I was inspired to do so when I realized that a recurrence of my PTSD symptoms was creating problems between me and a close friend. When I felt triggered, I would become somewhat manic. I would start talking and be unable to stop, going on and on about all the terrible things that had happened to me.

This is not uncommon with people who have PTSD. Our condition is caused by experiencing severe trauma--reliving that trauma is often our primary symptom.

The friendship in question was particularly valuable to me. After years of meeting gay men who could only be described as embittered, bitchy queens, I had finally met an intelligent, educated gay man who was a genu-inely nice guy. He cared about other people. I didn’t want to lose this friendship. He had been supportive above and beyond the call of duty, but at one point our conversations had become all about me and my sad little life. The support had stopped going both ways.

No matter what we’ve been through, no matter how

much pain we’re in, we mustn’t forget that other peo-ple also have needs. No man is an island, as the old saying goes.

And so I started meeting with Jim, a gay therapist who specializes in working with LGBTQ trauma survivors. The gay conversion therapy I lived through as a child, and the more recent attempts by gay bloggers to in-flame anti-gay and anti-Semitic hate against me for nothing more than a cheap laugh (which I’ve written about in various publications) certainly qualified me as a trauma survivor. Though writing about these inci-dents was cathartic, I hadn’t, in recent years, been tak-ing care of myself. It was time to do some real healing work and get myself back on track. Jim and I are now going into the second month of our client/therapist re-lationship. Our first few sessions made me realize how damaged I now am: there were many topics I needed to talk about: anti-gay religious abuse, growing up in a home with abusive parents who wouldn’t accept me for who I was, being bullied in the neighborhood for being gay, getting caught up in the gay-on-gay bully-ing that a traumatized LGBT community now inflicts on itself--where to begin?

For our first few sessions I ranted, jumping around from topic to topic. But it felt great to get it out. It’s a beginning.

Christopher Pennock is an actor with a long list of credits on TV, in theater and in film. He’s best known for his runs on the daytime dramas Dark Shadows and Gen-eral Hospital. Chris and I are Facebook friends. At about the time I was beginning my own work with Jim, Chris, who

Nahmod - Con’t on page 6

If You Could Read My MindA PTSD Memoir: Therapy Works

By David-Elijah Nahmod