>> OUTREACH: WHITE HOUSE TO HOLD LGBT CONFERENCES AROUND THE COUNTRY <<
MOVIES: Glenn Close in Albert Nobbs.
VIDEO: A day at the dog park, from the dog's perspective.
Maryland First Lady calls anti-gays 'cowards', apologizes.
MUSIC VIDEO Manila Luzon from RuPaul's Drag Race: Hot Couture.
I haven't smiled this big in weeks. This a video of Dicken, featuring Milah and Korben -- which is to say, it's a video of what appears to be a really excellent dad covering Depeche Mode with his two surpassingly adorable kids. "Everything counts in large amounts," as they sing, and it's totally true -- especially rocking out with pops.
Watch AFTER THE JUMP ...
Continue reading "WATCH: Dad And Kids Do Depeche Mode"
Posted 2:33 PM EST by Brandon K. Thorp in Depeche Mode, Music, Music Video | Permalink | Comments (17)
Russia's so homophobic, it won't even tolerate gay flight attendants.
Maxim Kupreev is a 25-year-old flight attendant employed by Aeroflot, Russia's largest airline. In order to change the prevailing anti-gay atmosphere in his workplace, Kupreev decided to organize a group of LGBT Aeroflot employees. In response, his bosses commanded him: Marry a woman or you're fired.
From GayStarNews:
The creation of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender group in Aeroflot was announced on 20 June 2011. At this time, Kupreev, the founder of the group said it would fight for the direct inclusion of discrimination ban on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity into internal documents of Aeroflot. His group also planned to fight for the recognition of same-sex partners of the employees.
The next day the official spokesperson of the airline, Irina Dannenberg, told the French news agency AFP that there was no LGBT group in her company. According to her, ‘one should separate personal and professional life,’ AFP reported.
And yet:
Kupreev was given an ultimatum late last year to enter into heterosexual marriage or to lose his job. At the end of 2011 he married his school friend Sofia Mikhailova who got the right to fly Aeroflot for 10% of the fare – and other company privileges.In order to register marriage with Kupreev, Mikhailova had to dissolve her real marriage to Grigoriy Andreykin. The divorce was finalised on 11 October last year.
‘Aeroflot effectively broke a real marriage and created a sham one,’ [said Nikolai Alekseev, founder of Moscow Pride.]
Alekseev and other Russian activists have organized a boycott of Aeroflot, which shall begin on February 9th at a protest outside Aeroflot's Moscow offices.
Posted 2:09 PM EST by Brandon K. Thorp in Discrimination, Moscow, Russia | Permalink | Comments (5)
The Concord Monitor has a detailed story out today about the various forces arrayed for and against the repeal of marriage equality in New Hampshire. Interestingly, the decisive votes are likely to arise from within the state's Republican party. Despite a veto-proof majority in both houses of the state legislature, and despite an official party-line definition of marriage that exludes same-sex unions, Republicans are worried -- indeed, seem almost certain -- that the repeal's a no-go. From the Monitor:
"It is certainly disappointing to me," Sen. Fenton Groen, a Rochester Republican who has been vocal in his support of the repeal, said last week. "I think that, in the House particularly, we have a significant libertarian caucus within the Republican Party. . . . And there are some Republicans who differ on that within that caucus."
In order to repeal marriage equality in New Hampshire, anti-marriage Republicans would have to bring to bear 2/3 majorities against a veto by Democrat governor John Lynch, and it looks very much like libertarian Republicans may keep that from happening:
"I'm for liberty and freedom, leaving people alone so long as they don't harm or defraud other people," said Rep. Steve Winter, a Newbury Republican who opposes the repeal.
Winter, a 73-year-old retired airline captain, was Senate clerk under Republican former Senate president Tom Eaton from 2002 to 2006. He considers himself a "fiscal conservative and a social libertarian."
"I believe what people do with their lives, how they select their mates, is none of my business and none of the state's business," Winter said.
Rep. Seth Cohn, a Canterbury Republican who moved here as part of the Free State project, a libertarian movement to relocate to New Hampshire, is also against repeal. Cohn and others believe the bill may pass the House but does not have the two-thirds majority to override a potential veto by Democratic Gov. John Lynch, who signed the bill three years ago legalizing same-sex marriage.
There are some pro-repeal voices among the libertarians, too. The head of New Hampshire's Republican Liberty Caucus, Carolyn McKinney, worries that failure to repeal could result in the curtailment of religious liberties, and (in a uniquely New Hampshire/libertarian twist) that the erosion of traditional families might lead to dependence on government and the consequent expansion of the state. Other libertarians voice similar concerns, but probably not enough. From the Monitor:
"I know for a fact, based on people I've talked to, that if Gov. Lynch vetoes it, that veto is not override-able," Cohn said.
Posted 1:03 PM EST by Brandon K. Thorp in Gay Marriage, Law - Gay, LGBT, New Hampshire, Religion, Republican Party, Tea Party | Permalink | Comments (5)
This was yesterday in LA. On the one hand: Very impressive, in an athletic way. On the other: Just because you can sing a note, must you? Watch AFTER THE JUMP ...
Continue reading "WATCH: Christina Aguilera Sings "At Last" At Etta James's Funeral"
Posted 11:10 AM EST by Brandon K. Thorp in Christina Aguilera, Deaths, Music | Permalink | Comments (37)
AFTER THE JUMP, watch a video of The Young Turks discussing Tennessee state Sen. Stacey Campfield's regrettable Sirius Radio interview last week, in which Sen. Campfield asserted that:
Most people realize that AIDS came from the homosexual community. It was one guy screwing a monkey, if I recall correctly, and then having sex with men. It was an airline pilot, if I recall.
As Andy reported Friday, Campfield went on to assert that heterosexuals are virtually immune to HIV/AIDS.
I took a look at what appears to be Sen. Campfield's blog -- the link to which was helpfully supplied supplied by a Towleroad reader last week -- and it seems Campfield has actually read And The Band Played On. Campfield wrote:
The research on sex with a monkey being the first transmitter of AIDS has not been proven nor firmly dis proven. It is one of about 5 theories I was able to find on the source of AIDS. No credible source said any one was clearly definitive one way or the other.
It was first published I think in a book which documents the history of the AIDS epidemic is entitled "And the Band Played On." The author of "And the Band Played on" was appalled by the unsanitary and degrading behavior of homosexuals. He died of AIDS a year after his book was published. The homosexual pilot comment was first printed in the American Journal of medicine article about "Patient 0". His name was Gaeton Dugas. While possibly not the first person with AIDS he is still widely considered the person who widely transmitted the modern outbreak of the disease.
This is a remarkable document, and not only because it demonstrates that at least one American legislator is unable to spell "disproven." (I don't think it's a fluke, for Sen. Campfield demonstrates similar difficulties with prefixes elsewhere on his blog.) Mostly it's remarkable for demonstrating a terrifying absence of reading comprehension on the part of a man who makes laws regulating the behaviors of people he reads about. As even the most casual AIDS scholars surely know, Gaetan Dugas was no pilot, and it's never been suggested that he had sex with monkeys. (And some would say that Randy Shilts was anything but "appalled" at the excesses of gay life in the 1970s, but that's another matter.) And it's not just "possible" that Dugas wasn't the first person with AIDS. Unless the tweenaged Gaetan Dugas spent the mid-1960s trafficking diseases between Africa and Missouri, it's a fact.
No one can know everything, and nothing can be known by everybody. But Sen. Campfield is the author of Tennessee's "Don't Say Gay" bill -- which he defends, in the very same blog post, by stating that:
- While there is a scientific and educational need to mention the basics of heterosexuality when teaching the basics of reproduction (XY chromosomes, etc.) there is no scientific need to mention homosexuality as homosexuals do not naturally reproduce.
- We are falling behind the rest of the world in math, science, and English amongst other things. Tennessee ranks about 46th in most areas. Social engineering is just one less issue teachers should have to worry about teaching as part of their curricula.
-- and so it shouldn't be too much to hope he'd attempt to understand the populations he means to rule. But he won't. It's a testament to Sen. Campfield's incuriousness that he doesn't bother to wonder why, given his own standards, prepubescent children should know about "natural reproduction" but not plain-old sex; or what positions vis a vis sexuality are taken by those countries which have eclipsed the United States in "math, science, and English amongst other things."
Continue reading "Homophobic Sen. Campfield Confused About AIDS, Education, And Everything"
Posted 9:43 AM EST by Brandon K. Thorp in AIDS/HIV, Education, Michelangelo Signorile, Stacey Campfield, Tennessee | Permalink | Comments (25)
Teenaged hoods in a vanished Brooklyn.
New Jersey columnist asks 'phobic readers to explain how marriage equality will diminish the worth of heterosexual marriage. They can't quite do it.
Housing and Urban Development Secretary promises to ban anti-LGBT housing discrimination.
First, Newt was into pot. Then, he was into executing pot traffickers.
Gingrich, 1982: All too often the hysteria that attends public debate over marijuana’s social abuse compromises a clear appreciation for this critical distinction [between medical use and abuse] ... We believe licensed physicians are competent to employ marijuana, and patients have a right to obtain marijuana legally, under medical supervision, from a regulated source ...
Gingrich, 1996: If you import a commercial quantity of illegal drugs [including marijuana], it is because you have made the personal decision that you are prepared to get rich by destroying our children. I have made the decision that I love our children enough that we will kill you if you do this ... The first time we execute 27 or 30 or 35 people at one time, and they go around Colombia and France and Thailand and Mexico, and they say, ‘Hi, would you like to carry some drugs into the U.S.?’ the price of carrying drugs will have gone up dramatically.
Coulter and Bachmann witnesses in bizarre Tea Party scam case:
After no one took him up on his televised “lie detector challenge,” the man accused of scamming his co-investors in the failed television venture Tea Party HD is trying to make his case by calling a number of high-profile conservative witnesses like Michele Bachmann and Ann Coulter to his defense.
TPHD was founded in 2010 by Loiacono and Bill Hemrick, purporting to be the “world’s first HD provider of news about the Tea Party.” But Hemrick and the five other businessmen who invested in the company claim that Loiacono never put in his share of the funding, used the existing money as his “personal bank account,” and didn’t do the work laid out by the initial deal. “In reality it was an investment scheme to defraud politically conservative-minded citizens who support the Tea Party mission,” the suit said.
Ron Paul's probably not a racist. And yet ...
Alien from the perspective of Jonesy.
When pseudoscience kills:
Chantale Lavigne died in hospital after she and eight others in a personal-development seminar called Dying in Consciousness were covered with mud, wrapped in plastic, put under blankets and immobilized with their heads in cardboard boxes for about nine hours, under instructions to hyperventilate.
Lavigne was removed, unconscious and with a body temperature of 40.5 C, from the Ferme Reine de la Paix in the Drummondville, Que., area after a 911 call that Radio-Canada said had been made by Gabrielle Frechette, a self-styled therapist who was the seminar's operator."
Frechette, who claims that she channels Melchisedech, a Biblical figure, is denying that she has any culpability in Lavigne's death.
Does Yelp kill the fun of exploration?
“The efficiency that the Web has brought has downsides,” says Edward Tenner, a historian of technology and culture. “On balance, it works against happy accidents.” Tenner calls this counter-serendipity: when preconceived notions prevent lucky flukes. For instance, a poorly rated restaurant on Yelp might have a few die-hard fans — outliers who, for whatever reason, love the place. Their reviews might even be posted. But many of us go with the general consensus, writing off anywhere with a three-star ranking or less. “Is it possible that a place you really would have liked doesn’t have many positive comments, but you would have been one of the few positive ones?” asks Tenner.
How George Washington almost became a zombie:
The morning after Washington died, his step-granddaughter Elizabeth Law arrived with a family friend, William Thornton. History best remembers Thornton as the architect who created the original design for the Capitol building, but he was also a trained physician, having studied at the University of Edinburgh. Although he did not practice medicine for much of his life, Thornton always had a keen interest in the workings of the human body, and he suggested a novel method for resurrecting the fallen warrior. Thornton told Washington's wife Martha that he wanted to thaw Washington's body by the fire and have it rubbed vigorously with blankets. Then he planned to perform a tracheotomy so he could insert a bellows into Washington's throat and pump his lungs full of air, and finally to give Washington an infusion of lamb's blood.
Maryland's first lady sorry for referring to marriage-opposers as "cowards."
Madonna talks about new movie, W.E.:
Madonna said she hopes her movie will find its audience among women, who may relate to Wally's naive fantasies about Wallis' life, and the strength she draws from learning the more complex story. "There's three love stories in the film: There's Edward and Wallis, the blossoming love story between Wally and Evgeni, and there's the love affair between the two women," she said. "It's an important mythological story to tell ... of a woman helping another woman. I don't think it's something that we see very often in films. Mostly, we see women sabotaging other women."
Jeopardy contestants have no idea who Rachel Maddow is. Watch them stare blankly AFTER THE JUMP. (But most importantly: Read some of the vile things Breitbart readers have to say about it here.)
Continue reading "NEWS: Gangs, Gingrich, And A Ghastly Death At The Hands Of A Deranged New Ager"
Posted 7:16 PM EST by Brandon K. Thorp in 2012 Election, Ann Coulter, Gay Marriage, Maryland, Michelle Bachmann, New York, Newt Gingrich, Photography, Rachel Maddow, Tea Party, Zombies | Permalink | Comments (11)
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
| 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | 31 |
Recent Comments