• Having wrapped up its annual conference, the National Education Association is still sticking to its talking points: it does not endorse gay marriage. It just wants to. [CNS News]
• It took Out a little while to get around to the Ryan Smith gay bashing story, and now that the magazine finally did, readers are livid the story came so uncomfortably close to blaming Smith for his own attack. [Out]
• Now that New York’s highest court has made its decision regarding gay marriage, the question begs: Is that it? [Advocate]
• Forget how you’d feel if Jake Gyllenhaal or Vin Diesel came out. What would it mean to their straight girl fanbase? [After Elton]
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
• It’s not a summer in P-town if Andy Towle isn’t there. [Towleroad]
• D.C.’s most narcissistic gay explains the rules for playing Kings when your white ass isn’t surround by your frat guy-cum-yacht club member crowd. [VividBlurry]
janni
I think Jake Gyllenhaal’s “straight girl fanbase” is not exactly who you think it is. If you check his fan club at his official website you’ll find thoughtful intelligent mature male/female fans and very little of the female teeny bopper element you might expect.
Gary
Regarding OUT–I wouldn’t expect less from a magazine that consistenly places “straights-who-are-cool-or-beautiful-enough-to-play-gay” instead of real gay people (and by the way, when was the last time you saw, God forbid, a LESBIAN in that magazine?). In the OUT world, being “out and proud” is tinged with more than a little self-loathing. Thank God I gave up my subscription.
wk
Regarding the Out article: I can think of all kinds of places right here in the U.S.A. where two guys making out in a bar would be in danger for doing it. Would it be their fault for being stomped? No, but you’d really have to wonder about their common sense.
The gay guys were taking a risk when they made out with each other in that bar. You don’t see it happening in the U.S., but they felt free to do it in St. Maarten. I suspect because it was warm and tropical and they felt relaxed, and because they had a neo-colonial sense of invulnerability — the spirit captured in the Andrews Sisters song, “Rum & Coca Cola.” We can do anything we want.
After being challenged, they should have tried to calm things down rather than further raise the temperature. They shouldn’t have taunted anyone. They should have waited for an escort out of the place. And who can really be surprised at the local police? This is the Third World.
Does my reaction make me a self-hating homo? Maybe, but I can also tell you that I won’t be spending the rest of my lief with a metal plate in my skull. I give Out magazine credit for telling it like it is. That’s what good journalism does.
Rebecca
I went to graduate school at Columbia with Ryan and he is a sweetheart. We shared the same master’s thesis advisor, Richard Wald, and ryan was all about a subject that our professor hated. Ryan spent half of the year before he graduated documenting how gay man from the Middle East were fighting deportation charges after 9/11; they would’ve been killed in their home countries for being gay.
I’ve talked to Ryan since the attack, and he told me about Out and the reporter’s determination to get some sort of story trying to rationalize the attack on him. OUT owns a gay travel company that takes men to the island each month. hmmmmm.
He said that the reporter didn’t even call him until he tried to show up on his doorstep in Miami on his way to St. Maarten: it turned out Ryan was back in New York. Then, after getting back from the Caribbean, Ryan said that the Out called and tried to say that he said the word “nigger†after he was attacked, apparently trying to invent a white versus black thing. Anyone who knows what had happened realizes that Ryan immediately lost the ability to talk and say even one word (for weeks) let alone the ability to fight back. He was talking with his boyfriend about a death in his family when they were attacked.
This kid has done everything. Ryan spent a year of his life in Eastern Europe trying to document what farmers and poor people were dealing with after the fall of the USSR. He spent time working for Clinton at the White House. So when I see people make things up about him, it really hurts. I think of how foolish they are trying to justify the attackers brutality on “making out†and a made-up a statement by Dick Jefferson about Ryan doing “whatever he wants, whenever.†I know Ryan doesn’t talk Jefferson after Dick tried to exploit him after the attack, so maybe that is why they made something up. It’s all about control.
Cal
wk: if you are calling a hug after telling your bf about a death in you family “making out” and “raising the temperature”–
you are not only a self-hating homo, but are also clearly under-sexed.