Ty Herndon is one of country music's most engaged activists. He's, he's been knocking out hits for over 20 years. He's still writing music, but he's also working with teens and families to help raise awareness and offer support to members of the LGBTQ plus community.

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Brian Yenis interviewed Georgia state Senator Kim Jackson, who is also an Episcopal priest. Kim Jackson represents not only a historic shift in Georgia's politics. Her life story teaches us all something about grace, servant leadership and courage.

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Leslie Jordan has been having a banner year with a new book, a new gospel album and a new show all while owning who he is a sober gay Christian man.

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Grammy award-winning musician, and one of America's most renowned choral conductors. Greg hella Johnson is one of America's most renowned choral conductors, a Grammy award-winning musician with an uncanny ability to make many voices sound like one.

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Colorado governor Jared Polis sits down with Fox News to share his experience as America's first, openly gay governor Polis touching on his personal life, including being a same-sex parent and giving us a tour of the governor's mansion. 

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Dr. Haing Ngor survived the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime, smuggling his niece to safety in 1979, he then revisited the horror five years later in a movie role, that made him the first asian man to win an Academy Award for best supporting actor.

 

Ngor was born in Cambodia in 1940. When the Khmer Rouge began the Cambodian genocide in the late 70s, Ngor's status as a doctor put him at serious risk. He had to watch his wife die in childbirth in a concentration camp because revealing his skills could have meant the death of his whole family. Ngor and his orphaned niece escaped to a Thai refugee camp, then emigrated to the U.S.

 

It was there that a casting director, working on a film about the tragedy, discovered Ngor, who was hesitant at first. He had no previous acting experience, and the process would take him back to Thailand in the role of a Cambodian journalist who survived a similar ordeal to his own. For his part in 1984's  "The Killing Fields" Haing Ngor won the Oscar for best supporting actor - the first and still only Asian man to win that award.

 

Ngor dedicated the rest of his life to raising awareness of the horrors he and others had survived and advocating for South Asian refugees.

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Kalpana Chawla was an Indian-American space pioneer who tragically died in 2003  when the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry.

 

Born in Karnal, India in 1962, Chawla earned an engineering degree before emigrating to the United States. She received a PHD in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Colorado in 1988,  went to work at NASA’s, Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

 

Once she became a naturalized U.S. citizen, Chawla applied for the NASA Astronaut Corps, and was selected a few years later. On November 19, 1997, Kalpana Chawla made history as the first woman of Indian origin to rocket into space. Chawla was main operator for Columbia’s robotic arm using it to release and recapture a satellite.

 

Chawla has been remembered and honored in the years since the 2003 tragedy as an inspiration to young women worldwide. She was posthumously awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor, the NASA Space Flight Medal, and the NASA Distinguished Service Medal.

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An american hero in every respect, Hawaii senator Daniel Inouye started his long career of public service at just 17, volunteering for the red cross and tending to soldiers injured in the pearl harbor attack.

Inouye put his dream of becoming a surgeon on hold to join the army, enlisting in the storied 442nd regimental combat team - comprised mainly of second-generation japanese american men.

Through his service in world war two, Inouye earned the distinguished Silver Cross, Bronze Star, and Purple Heart, after losing his arm in a grenade blast in Italy. Politics came next; Daniel Inouye became the first congressman to serve Hawaii after it achieved statehood in 1959, then joined the Senate in 1962 until his death in 2012. Inouye was the first Japanese-American person to serve in each house.

 

Inouye was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor in the year 2000 along with 19 other veterans of the 442nd, after Congress and the U.S. Military reviewed the cases of men who may have been denied the honor due to racism.

In 2013, President Barack Obama posthumously awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom - making Daniel Inouye the first - and to date, the only - senator to receive the nation's two highest honors.

 

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Celebrating Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage. One of the first Korean congresswomen, Young Kim (R), represents the 39th congressional district of California.

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Celebrating the milestones of Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Heritage. 

The Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander community have come along way. Each with their own cultural distinctions, but all contributing to America's long colorful history. Starting in the 1800s the first settlers on the Asia Pacific were sailing across the oceans to find riches in the California gold rush. More than 20 million Asian Americans today trace their roots back to 20 countries in east, southeast, and south.

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