Last year, Andrew Haigh’s WEEKEND proved to be a low-key drama about a gay hookup that lasted as long as the title, with bittersweet results. The film was sincere and likable and once again sent out the message that indie cinema bravely goes where Hollywood rarely dares.
With all the backlash over “legitimate rape” vs. illegitimate (sic) rape last week, another great debate got a little lost in the shuffle: the gay-marriage debate between Dan Savage, sex columnist and married gay dad of one adopted son, and Brian Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage and straight married father of seven biological kids.
For all you TRANSGENERATION fans out there: here’s a cool t-shirt design on Qwertee called USBgendered “for those of us who think beyond binary.” Like Qwertee the site (and “Qwertee” the name), this design perfectly combines t-shirts with geek love (i.e. the love of all things techie). Like any of their shirts, you can vote to get it printed in a limited edition for only $12 bucks a pop.
The real problem with One Million Moms is not that there are one million of them. There arenât. It’s that they make passing the thirty-year threshold in life look like the end of… life. Their latest hate boycott is against JCPenney, first for picking up Ellen Degeneres (hi Ellen, who hates you?) and now for their decision to cater to America’s most notorious disposable income bracket this Father’s Day, gay menâor rather, gay fathers. Penney’s ad depicting two nerdish men raising children is so sweet you’d have to be smoking bath salts to find a problem with it. We’re not here to draw conjecture (save that for OMM), though we do love when marketers get hip to contemporary life. So here are some other notable campaigns that cater to gay consumers, the children that love them, and the granny panties that inadvertently get bunched. We assume One Million Moms wear granny panties. And that’s an OK statement ’cause it’s more empirical than conjecture.
This video of a North Carolinian pastor spewing homophobic hate has been making the rounds. Made “pukin’ sick” by the thought of men kissing men, Pastor Charles Worley comes up with a big idea to get rid of homosexuality once and for all — a “final solution,” if you will:
Build a great big large fence, 150 or 100 miles long. Put all the lesbians in there. Fly over and drop some food. Do the same thing with the queers and the homosexuals. Have that fence electrified so they canât get out. Feed âem, andâ And you know what? In a few years theyâll die out. You know why? They canât reproduce.
The New York Timesâ Sunday Review section decided to ratchet things up a bit in its Opposite the Editorials section with a pretty saucy op-ed written by two unassuming researchers. Their study of college studentâs implicit sexual orientation made waves online as they shared some empirical evidence. Part of the study observed a personâs comfort level with homosexuality, and it seems that one-fifth of those self-identified as very heterosexualâand homophobicâalso identified with homosexuals on a subconscious level. Or to paraphrase, a percentage of homophobes in the study are totes closet cases.
Who would have thought the Middle American, saccharine sweet hashtag #tomyunbornchild would be co-opted into a trending hate topic. But thatâs kind of the ironic danger of the Internet. At its core, the online world is an adult playground. And sometimes adults act like terrible mean spirited monsters bent on hurting strangers because, oh I donât know, someone didnât love them enough when they were young, they canât score a date, or theyâre just afraid of anything different. Whatever the senseless and irrational motivation to spread hate, there are still mature people around town, and online, trying to curb ill-intentioned behavior. A virtual neighborhood watch, as it were.
photo of a page from Rich’s “An Atlas of a Difficult World” via Flickr
Last Wednesday, the great American poet Adrienne Rich died (1929-2012). If you ever took a “Contemporary American Poetry” class in college, then she surely holds a special place in your artistic heart. In her influential poetry and essays, she explored her identity as a political activist, a feminist and a lesbian (which was bold for the time — and still is, sadly, in some circles). Here are some of our favorite lines of Rich’s poetry about love, sex, sexuality and gender:
Cynthia Nixon clarifies her controversial quote, explaining that she is gay “by choice” only because she is bisexual by nature.
Heart patients get the go-ahead for sex… so long as it’s with their spouse.
High school team can’t call themselves the Cougars because of its association with sexually-active, single, middle-aged women.
Speaking of cougars and high school: Sex and the City pre-quel pilot on the CW is a go.
Image credit: Gage Skidmore
Like any good reality show, the 2012 republican primary race is riddled with hypocritical and anachronistic characters that couldnât be more entertaining if they were scripted. What makes them so buzz worthy is that they believe in a lot of the rhetoric theyâre dishing out. But whatâs even more mind blowing is theyâre really speaking on behalf of their constituents, who in turn will defend the candidate. So color me, and my log cabin, crazy because I recently found out that Rick Santorum has gay men coming to his defense. I donât really have a log cabin, it was just the obvious reference, but apparently Rick Santorum might.
Happy 2012, everybody! It’s the year the world might end, but as old “Lady Spears” might sing, until the world ends weâve got to keep on dancing! However, in my case, dancing means trying to lose the ten pounds I gained after freebasing an entire turkey into my mouth on Thanksgiving. Or maybe trying to stop drinking because my body is starting to look like a leather shoe after the abundance of cocktails I’ve been slinging at it. However, forget about me. As a gay manâs best friend, there are a couple of NYE resolutions Iâve got to have to keep our relationship alive and flourishing, like a plant that is a gay best friend. Here are my top five:
We mentioned a recent Pew Research Center survey earlier this week (in Naked News) that shows how public acceptance of same-sex marriage has grown in the past two years, jumping by 9 percentage points, making the country now evenly divided on the issue, with 46% in support legalization and 44% opposed. While reading up on the topic, we found two interesting infographics, both of which show the progress that’s been made in the gay rights movement…
Our photographer friend David Jacobs (he took our deceptively flattering bio pic) was hired by Human Rights Campaign, a gay rights organization, to document New York’s first day of legal gay marriage this past Monday at Manhattan’s City Hall. HRC will soon have more on their site, but for now here’s a round-up of the day’s events by their National Field Director, Marty Rouse. And below is our friend Dave’s take on events (he’s not gay, but he’s married and does rock the occasional pink shirt with flare), followed by more of his cool photos of the happy couples.
We’re not comics fans, but even we know DC Comics. So now that they’re introducing a bunch of gay characters this fall, it’ll be nice for us to finally have a serious counterpoint to SNL’s Ambiguously Gay Duo. According to The Advocate:
DC Comics grabbed headlines last June when the company announced its entire line of comic books would be overhauled with 52 all-new #1 issues in September. Not only would iconic characters such as Superman and Wonder Woman restart with a fresh number, but costumes and origins for the entire universe of characters would be updated as well.
One state at a time! Last Friday evening New York passed a marriage equality bill, allowing gay couples to finally legally marry in the state. Within hours the Empire State building was lit up in a rainbow of colors — woohoo! The pics of the building went Twitterrific all weekend. The most plausible explanation we’ve heard is…
Happily Divorced couldnât ask for a better lead-in. It premieres on TV Land on June 15 directly after Hot in Cleveland, the biggest phenomenon to hit the upper part of the cable box since Half-Ton Teen.
It also has a pretty hot premise: Fran Drescher plays a florist whose 18-year marriage ends when her husband (John Michael Higgins) announces, âYep, Iâm gayââand for various reasons, they continue living together anyway!
Whatâs more, the show is loosely based on Drescherâs own experience. In fact, Drescher co-writes it with Peter Marc Jacobson, who happens to be her real-life gay ex-husband.
There are just two problems with the show, based on my viewing of the pilot: (A) Betty White isnât in it. (B) Itâs not that funny.
The myth is debunked â humankindâs sperm count is a-okay! Alabama passes “fetal pain” anti-abortion bill, with no exceptions for rape and incest. Miami high school elects transgender senior as prom queen. Tracy Morgan says gay is something kids learn from the media. Wyoming grants divorce to same-sex couple despite not performing same-sex marriages. Obama suggests…
In case you missed this making the rounds this last week, check out this 3 minute video of Representative Steve Simon (DFL Hopkins/St. Louis Park) eloquently — and we mean EL-O-QUENT-LY — urging his fellow Minnesotan lawmakers not to put a gay marriage ban on the ballot in 2012. They did, unfortunately. But that fact…
RefuseToLie.org is an effort to take a stand against the federal government’s refusal to recognize gay marriages across the country. As it is now, the IRS calls for gay couples who are legally married in states that recognize the union to file as “single” — and some people aren’t going to step in line anymore.…
At least, that’s what Ling’s new show on OWN (Oprah’s new tv network) should be called, instead of “Our America with Lisa Ling.” After all, four of the first five episodes focus on matters of sexuality: There’s “Pray the Gay Away,” which looks at the conflicts between Christianity and homosexuality; “Transgendered Lives,” which profiles several different people who were born in the wrong body; “The State of Sex Offenders” which takes a look at criminals once they’re out of jail; and tonight at 10pm “Online Brides,” which we’re guessing (from the promos) follows men to foreign lands who are in search of love (read: paid-for sex slaves). The first three (which we’ve seen) all take a very personal and intimate look at how these issues are affecting real people — it’s fascinating stuff, all shot very cinematically.
For the second year in a row, the Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping will be celebrating this Valentine’s Day weekend with an un-marriage ceremony for straight married couples who support gay marriage at The Bethesda Fountain in NYC’s Central Park on Sunday from 1 – 2pm. The idea is “no marriage…
Passionate, eloquent, convincing, short and to the point — this is a defense of gay marriage made for the Internet. Zach Wahls, a 19-year-old University of Iowa engineering student, spoke out before the Iowa House of Representatives last week against a resolution which would end civil unions in that state by describing his life with…
We usually hate anything that anthropomorphizes cuddly animals in some inanely cute way, like with tuxedos or having them work at a desk or some shit like that (you know, the kind of stuff your mom forwards to you and her entire address book, NOT bcc’d). But we can’t resist this particular case, since it…
Research shows that lesbian women earn more than straight women — even when you control for the facts that lesbian women tend to be better-educated, more likely to be white, live in cities, have fewer children, and more likely to be professionals. So how to explain this wage gap? Economics professor Marina Adshade of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, examines a hypothesis that it has to do with the division of labor in your typical heterosexual union. In short, the theory goes, a straight woman is raised with the assumption that she will most likely marry a man who earns more than she does for the same amount of work, and also that she will be taking on the lion’s share of at-home, unpaid labor. Which means that she is slightly less motivated that her lesbian peers to get ahead at work. Lesbian women — at least, as long as they have been gay — don’t make this assumption.