Yawar Charlie isn’t kidding. He and husband Jason were among the 33 couples who got married in a very public ceremony featuring Madonna — as well as Queen Latifah, Macklemore, and Mary Lambert — during the 2014 Grammy Awards, broadcast to an estimated 150 million people worldwide. It was a very public coming out for Charlie, who stood out by wearing the traditional garb of a Pakistani Muslim man.
“My mom called and said, ‘Well, everybody knows now,'” Charlie recalls. “It was very touching and heartwarming to get phone calls and emails from people all over the world — from Saudi Arabia to Qatar to Iran.” Many of these strangers conveyed a similar message: Charlie’s wedding “was inspirational to watch, and especially to see someone in traditional clothing.”
Charlie, who grew up in San Francisco as part of “a very strict Muslim” immigrant family, was further encouraged by the largely positive reactions of his broader family and community. “When Jason and I had what I call our friends and family wedding, several months after the Grammys, there was a section of my family that didn’t attend,” he says. “It was very simple, and I realized why they weren’t there and I didn’t make a big deal about it. I said, ‘You know what? I’d rather focus on who is here.’ Again, I wore traditional clothing. We had the traditional aspect to it because I felt that I deserved the same as anybody else getting married in my culture.”
Charlie is returning to the public spotlight of television, this time as a member of the cast of Listing Impossible. The new CNBC weekly reality show centers on a team of top-selling realtors in Los Angeles attempting to sell languishing luxury properties. “A lot of real estate shows are drama-oriented or scripted reality,” Charlie says. “This show is not that. This is about business, and it really truly is an organic unfolding of the process.”
With the show, Charlie becomes the first openly gay South Asian season regular on CNBC. It’s the chance to once again be a positive LGBTQ role model that motivates him most about the show.
“It’s important to see reflections of diversity succeed in a luxury market where you don’t necessarily see that representation on TV,” he says. “I really want to show that someone from the LGBTQ community can be a success in business, in a competitive field, in a major city, and still be their authentic self and still be visible. I think that is the biggest gift that I’ve been given by being on the show.”
The weatherman said it would be hot Monday night, and he wasn’t lying. The torrid D.C. heat had the cowboys, gals, and dolls sweating out of their boots on night two of Beyoncé’s record-breaking Cowboy Carter Tour at Northwest Stadium, in Landover, Maryland.
Even the ever-cool Mrs. Carter must have been feeling the ninety-plus degrees. Bey and her dancers broke out boxer briefs and sports bras -- new custom crystal-beaded Calvin Klein, of course -- midway through her set and in plenty of time for a red-hot “Heated,” part of the show’s glorious return to Renaissance.
But Bey began, bless her, draped in a full feather cape by Elie Saab over a red, white, and blue spangled Saab bodysuit. Entering to the sound of a galloping horse and the crowd screaming her name, the head cowgirl in charge lit into “Ameriican Requiem,” a rock-and-soul call for the nation to live up to its ideals, off the singer’s Grammy-winning Cowboy Carter album.
On July 21, Wilmer Chavarria, superintendent of Vermont's Winooski School District, was detained for hours by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport after returning from a family visit to Nicaragua with his husband, Essex High School teacher Cyrus Dudgeon.
Officers seized Chavarria's phone and computer, separated him from Dudgeon, and interrogated him for at least five hours about his marriage and his job, according to Vermont's alternative weekly Seven Days.
During the interrogation, agents questioned whether Chavarria and Dudgeon were really married and repeatedly asked if Chavarria was actually a school superintendent. In an email to school board members, Chavarria described the experience as "abusive interrogation" and said he was "treated in a manner that is deeply disturbing and unacceptable."
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