If you suspected a few members of the Justice League of America were gay (hello, Aquaman?) and always wished they’d come out of the closet, there’s now a new ALL-gay superhero comic just for you. It’s called Spandex. What it lacks in artistic skill (visually speaking, this ain’t no DC Comic), it makes up for in fabulous gay pride. There’s “Liberty (glamorous transvestite superhero), Diva (a lesbian Wonder Woman), Prowler (absorbs the abilities of gay people), Glitter (male Dazzler), Indigo (beautiful French teleporter), and Mr Muscles & Butch (strong twins)” (see above). We would have thought there’d be at least one big buff or bearded super dude and one super butch without cleavage, but that’s just us (and we’re neither gay nor comic-book readers, so what do we know?). It’s available from the U.K. but you can download a pdf of the first 40-page comic in the series via Paypal here. More excerpts after the jump.
Guess which book, according to the American Library Association, is the title most often requested to be removed from schools and libraries in the U.S.? Give up? For the third year in a row, it’s And Tango Makes Three, which is a guide to building your own bomb while smoking crack and attending orgies in the evenings. Oh wait, sorry, no: And Tango Makes Three is actually the heartwarming, award-winning, bestselling 2005 children’s book about two male penguins who hatch a baby chick. We’ll say that again: Since its publication in 2005, more people have asked for this book to be removed from a school or library than any other book in the entire Library of Congress. Oh, yeah, and the book is based on the true story of two male penguins called Roy and Silo who hatched an egg together at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Talk about going against nature! (Yes, penguins can be gay. Or, rather, bi.)
But here’s a bit of news to warm the cockles of your heart: the authors behind the book, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, who also happen to be a couple, now have a Tango of their own. Their daughter Gemma was born to a surrogate mother with sperm from one of the men (they left it up to chance which one). Which totally makes up for the devastating news that Silo has since taken up with a female penguin named Scrappy. (Something similar happened this summer to San Francisco’s gay penguins.) Hey, sometimes life imitates art — and other times, life imitates a crappy soap opera.
We were tickled pink a few weeks back when we read about the so-called gay penguins who were raising an adopted chick. But “bisexual penguins” would probably have been more accurate; most scientists agree that animals that engage in same-sex activity don’t usually shun heterosexual encounters. Rather, they simply have ingrained gay tendencies that are a part of what make their little animal community work. As sociologist Eric Anderson of the University of Bath in England so succinctly puts it, “Animals don’t do sexual identity. They just do sex.”
While the issue of same sex relationships ruffles the feathers of various tribes among the supposedly higher brain functioning bipedal primate sub species of homo sapiens, this is barely a controversy in the rest of the animal kingdom who seem to all shrug their collective shoulders or fins or wings at gay and lesbian lifestyles. Scienceray lists ten animals comfortable with same sex partnerships.
The new documentary OUTRAGE, opening this Friday, exposes closeted gay politicians who publicly oppose gay rights. The theory being, why should they get to stay in the closet if they’re actively holding back the gay rights movement in their day job and yet enjoying all its benefits after dark?
Female dragon lizards in Australia figured out how to avoid sex: They just lie on their backs. Apparently the male dragon lizards can’t mount them in this position, what with them having two penises. Also, when these lizards mate, the male bites the female’s neck, which can pierce her spine and kill her. Combine that with the two penises, and, yeah, we think we’d play dead, too.
Miss Gay-Marriage-Hatin’ California is still in the news, this time because it turns out that the pageant organization paid for her breast implants. And there we were thinking that beauty pageants were all about celebrating inner beauty. [via]
Female drunk-driving is on the rise and experts are blaming Sex & the City, even though everyone knows that one of the best things about living in New York City is that no one drives — no drunk-driving, no designated driving, just really scary cab rides. That said, we do blame Sex & the City for making people think that all sex writers spend their rent money on Manolos. We like our Chuck Taylors, thank you very much.
A librarian digs up a kids’ book called I’m Glad I’m a Boy! I’m Glad I’m a Girl! that makes us very glad it’s 2009. (”Boys invent things. Girls use what boys invent. We need each other!”) Still, how is it possible that this book was still being printed in the 70s?!!
It’s this kind of thing — a new, totally rad T-shirt logo from Wordboner — that scares the bejeezus out of homophobes like the National Organization for Marriage. So frightened are they of an imaginary army of gay soldiers forcing them into a life of sodomy that they put together this gem of fear-tactic propaganda (our favorite line, with our own italics: “We’ve put together a rainbow coalition of people of every creed and color who are coming together in love to protect marriage”). Naturally, it took about two seconds for a slew of parodies to hit the Internets — one of the best so far is “from” Restoring Integrity to Marriage or “RIM” (see RimsJob.org, tee hee). For a non-parody antidote to this kind of bigotry, check out Iowa State Senate Majority Leader Mike Gronstal’s response to Minority Leader Paul McKinley and his efforts to amend Iowa’s constitution in order to undo the recent unanimous decision by the state’s Supreme Court to legalize gay marriage.
