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Macklemore and Ryan Lewis had huge hits with their songs Thrift Shop and Can’t Hold Us, and then another unexpected hit in Same Love, a song that makes the political case for gay marriage. Or as Macklemore puts it: “No freedom till we’re equal. Damn right I support it.” More on the success of [...] The culture wars of the 1990s obsessed about everything sexual, which put gay people right in the center of the bullseye because of what we represented about the human condition. And because of that, what happened to gay people would affect everyone. Or as the right wing magazine The Nation put it in their 1993 [...] Wholesome homemaking brand Betty Crocker, of Minnesota’s General Mills, just came out for gay families in a really big way. Their video is lovely, and the statement it makes – stunning. It ends: Our differences make us unique. Love makes us the same. ~ Betty Crocker The gay vote won the election for Barack Obama in 2012. While this might seem an extraordinary claim, consider that heterosexual voters split their votes 49/49, so the tie breaker went to the gay vote. Gay voters went for Obama 76-22, putting Obama over the top. Romney won straight Ohio and Florida votes, but lost [...] Rap has a history of homophobia, but even there things are changing. From B. Dolan, a sign of the times: Gay marriage rights won the popular vote for the first time in the election of November 6, 2012 Three states had full marriage rights on the ballot: Maine, Maryland, and Washington. All three won. Minnesota had a measure on the ballot to amend their constitution to ban gay marriage. It lost. Same-sex marriage is [...]
Lana Wachowski at HRC Astonishing. Lana Wachowski tells her story, and you should watch. Lana was one of the Wachowski brothers when they made The Matrix, V for Vendetta, and other films, and co-directed the new movie Cloud Atlas as Lana, now part of the brother-sister pair with her brother Andy. I could tell more [...] The NY Times has one of its puffy cultural pieces about ex-gay men who claim they are cured of their homosexuality, but even a cursory read reveals these are some very sad men. The story leads with a man who has wrestled against his sexuality his whole life, including seventeen years of marriage, finally finding [...] You may not be following the reality TV show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo on TLC, a humorous look at a charismatic self-described redneck family in Georgia, but suddenly we have a gay redneck spokesman. Honey Boo Boo is a precocious seven year old who has opinions on everything, including on her Uncle Poodle, Honey [...] Orlando Cruz came out recently, making him the first openly gay man in professional boxing and one of the very few in professional sports. Boxer Orlando Cruz (photo: Dennis M. Rivera Pichardo, AP) At a time when few professional athletes are out in any sport, that is a daring move. As Cruz he told [...]
Brendon Ayanbadejo of the Baltimore Ravens. NoH8 is the pro-gay marriage campaign that arose after the Mormon-led Proposition 8 took away equal marriage in California. [Language warning: The attached letter includes some wonderfully pungent obscenities.] Professional sports is a holdout of our old culture of homophobia, so it is lovely to see change arriving, even [...] Arnold Schwarzenegger, musclehead turned action hero turned governor, was not generally a gay ally. He said marriage should only be between a man and a woman, and when the California Legislature passed bills approving same-sex marriage Schwarzenegger vetoed them, twice. But people can grow and change. We now find out that Schwarzenegger performed the marriage [...] The New Republic‘s Jed Perl describes Michelangelo’s The Dream as his most haunting drawing. The dreamer is a handsome young man, his naked muscular body decisively, dramatically posed. But the dream itself is tangled, ambiguous, dramatically confounding. Amidst the tension between the calm of the central figure and the agitation swarming around it, [...] In 1966, three years before the Stonewall rebellion in New York, drag queens and others rioted against the police in San Francisco, a moment beautifully documented in the documentary Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria. As the director states, “It was the first known instance of collective militant queer resistance to police harassment [...] An intelligent young Christian of deep faith worked through how his homosexuality relates to his Bible-based beliefs. Interviewed in the New York Times, Matthew Vine’s summarizes his research: It is simply a fact that the Bible does not discuss or condemn loving, gay relationships. [...] The point is that these texts have a meaning, and [...] Before Mao Tse-tung created today’s unified China under communist rule the country was a weak state ravaged by foreign powers, a weakness exemplified by Puyi, the last Emperor of China. Anyone who has seen Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (highly recommended if you haven’t) knows the basics: the strangely pampered childhood after his rise to the [...] I know the author Fran Lebowitz mostly because she is so quotable. In a recent article she nailed what I have felt for a long time — that much of the progress we have made as a gay community is because of AIDS. That most massive of dark clouds had an astonishing silver lining. It [...] Sesame Street’s beloved Big Bird was created by two gay lovers who lived together for over 50 years, Kermit Love and his partner Christopher Lyall. They created the original Big Bird from a Jim Henson sketch and those glass toy drinking birds that rock back and forth as they drip their beaks in a glass [...] Q.: Why do we call heterosexual people “straight”? A.: Because homosexuality was a crime and “straight people” were those who did not commit that crime. Saint Matthew teed off the concept with his description of the path to righteousness in Matthew 7:14, which King Jame’s translators rendered as: Because strait is the gate, and narrow [...] Malala Yousafzai, 14, was shot in the head for being a girl who wanted to go to school in her home city of Mingora, Pakistan. Taliban militants claimed responsibility after targeting her for openly expressing the belief that females should receive an education. After extensive brain surgery she is still alive, but barely. There [...] From the travel website Expedia, one of the many companies in Washington State that have stood up for marriage equality for their employees and customers, comes this lovely story: Most parents of gay kids have a similar story of their journey to acceptance. I love the backstory Expedia shares: Nikki and Jill had first [...] The name of the god Apollo rings across time as the classic young, powerful, beautiful man. He is typically portrayed as the ideal kouros, the beardless athletically bodied youth idealized by the ancient Greeks. Apollo had many powerful attributes as he was the god of the sun and light, prophecy, healing, music, and poetry. Typical [...] Pompeii is important because it froze a Roman city in time, so we get to see glimpses of ancient lives caught in their doomed city like a fly in amber. One of the fascinating things preserved in Pompeii is the graffiti on the city walls where the thoughts of the people are written uncensored [...]
Farnese Hercules statue, Roman copy of a Greek original circa 300 BC, National Archaeological Museum, Naples, Italy. The name Hercules (Heracles in Rome) still resonates as the ultimate slab of masculinity. Hercules was a stud, having sex with countless women and bearing as many as 500 children. In one story a king named Thespios [...] Having grown up in a community defined by its sense of being persecuted for being different, primarily on the issue of marriage, it is painful to watch the inability of the Mormons to get the irony of their anti-marriage positions. My theory on why Mormons, of all people, cling to the narrowest definitions of traditional [...]
Diana of Versailles, attributed to Leochares, Roman circa 100 AD, Louvre Museum Artemis, called Diana by the Romans, was one of the greatest deities of Greece and Rome. She represented represented female power living as a maiden hunter with no need for a man. Artemis (Diana) never married, living as a sworn virgin in the [...]
(photo by Leland Bobbe, www.lelandbobbe.com) Drag queens are a bit of a mystery to me. I enjoy their color, bravado, and theatricality, but I’ve always wondered about the deeper feelings inside these men that drives them to such extreme, and often odd, semi-impersonations of woman. Something in this photo essay by Leland Bobbe cracks open [...]
Dionysus and satyr, Roman copy of a Greek statue circa 200 AD, from the excavations of the Palazzo Mattei a Quattro Fontane. Dionysus and satyr, Roman copy of a Greek statue circa 200 AD, from the excavations of the Palazzo Mattei a Quattro Fontane.[/caption]Dionysus was the god of wine, ecstasy, poetry, and love. He was [...] Shy, he stepped off into the cornfield. I could see his back muscles under the damp shirt quiver and go slack. Turning again to face the shade, he smiled at me, not squinted, smiled, and finished tugging shut his fly. Now, when the cornstalks in the night wind slide like fire, I see him. [...] |
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