Charles Merrill may have once been married to Johnson & Johnson heiress, Evangeline, but residents of Hendersonville, North Carolina treat him like a common fag.

The 72-year old out artist and avowed atheist claims noxious homophobia forced him and his boyfriend to flee to Palm Springs:

They wanted to start an anti-gay resolution saying they didn't want the 'gay lifestyle' in that county. We got a rabbit with its feet cut off in our mailbox, and guys in pickup trucks would ride by and shoot their shotguns off. We were under siege.

In addition to these intimidations, Merrill apparently got into it with the town's local paper. He had been posting comments under the name "Charles 6", but nasty neighbors started referring to him as Charles 666: a devilish designation, to say the least, but not one Merrill wouldn't claim:

Since I had that mark of the beast, I just thought I'd give them the whole enchilada and call myself Anti-Christ. About two or three days later, my account was suspended.

The virtual ouster, he says, violates his First Amendment rights. Hendersonville Times online editor Matt Rehm insists Merrill violated the paper's "community guidelines" and that he's more than welcome to comment under another name, just not Anti-Christ. Maybe that name's already taken...

Charles Merrill: Blogger, 'Anti Christ' [Radar]

• Hong Kong's Obscene Articles Tribunal ruled a lesbianic poem containing the line, "I'd like to pinch your thighs" too obscene for public display. It could have been worse. It could have said, "I want to lick your wet vagina until it swallows me whole." How's that for obscene?

• A Witeck-Combs Communications and Packaged Idea study claims gays will have at least $835 billion in disposable income by 2011. Approximately half will be spent on poppers and blow jobs.

• We wonder if any of those blow jobs will involve the new New York City condoms? They're just like regular condoms only New York-ier. Or something.

• You guys worked hard today. Why not take a look at some more naked footage from Big Brother Brazil?

• Big Brother Brazil may not censor hineys, but an American Airline employee censored the word "homosexual" from The Queen. (Oh, and God, too.)

• Those scamps at The Baptist Press have taken aim at Ford for advertising in fag-mags like Out. Shit, if they didn't have the gays, they'd be belly-up by now.

We can't imagine why only 37 postings have been made on the government-funded "official" gay bulletin boards. Doesn't the fact that the Chinese government has put up bulletin boards for the gays mean that they are showing their support for gay issues?

Apparently not. Popular opinion is that Chinese gays are worried the government would track them down and monitor what they are saying. The fact that these official sites popped up around the time the government was closing popular, non-government-run gay sites is another point of concern.

The Chinese government takes such a simplistic and heavy-handed approach to this and other issues (like cartoons) that sometimes we wonder if they haven't been sharing tips with our own President.

China Gays Rebuff Websites [365 Gay]

Turkey's gay magazine Kaos GL has been continually published since 1994, but the government has recently shut them down in the name of "general morality" after they included an article entitled "Visuality of Sexuality, Sexuality of Visuality: Pornography" in the latest issue.

The article discusses the relationship between homosexuality and pornography, and such a topic has apparently offended those in the Turkish government. Three quarters of all Turks disapprove of homos, so it's not surprising those same bigots are very well-represented in the capital.

Turkey is applying to join the European Union, which has a more progressive stance on civil rights for gays as well as freedom of the press, so it will be interesting to see if anyone in Brussels has a problem with this most recent act of censorship.

Turkey bans gay magazine [PinkNews]
Kaos GL [Official Site, English]

• Despite widespread reports to the contrary, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue never named actor Sir Ian McKellen a honorary member to the state's National Guard. Not only does the position not exist, but the entire rumor mill began after a misappropriated quote in Rush & Molly. [NYB]

• You TiVo is tattling on you. [NYT]

• Little Miss Sunshine is a critics' favorite across the board, which is surprising — since it actually does look worth seeing. [HWT]

• Even Andy Towle agrees: Sex sells. [After Elton]

• Rather than let the federal government decide what TV programming to censor, the entertainment industry is launching a $300 million campaign to convince parents it's their responsibility to keep their kids safe. [LAT]

Randy Jackson of Nampa, Idaho (not the one from American Idol) just can't get enough of The Joy of Gay Sex. He checked it out of his local public library and now refuses to return the book for indeterminate reasons. He claims he is keeping it as an act of protest because he believes libraries should not carry books about ass-fucking. This story, however, seems shaky at best, especially considering the book's informative content. We suspect that Mr. Jackson is either a slow reader or an extreme perfectionist that was embrassed when he received a late notice in the mail.

No 'Joy of Gay Sex' at This Idaho Town Library [Fox News]

90 books in the gay and lesbian sex spontaneously burst into flame Tuesday at the Boystown branch of the Chicago Public Library. Ten books in the African American History section were also damaged in the fire, which was an expected casualty as the gays and blacks are usually ghettoized together in most public institutions.

Chicago police are investigating the cause of the fire, which was most likely some gay erotic fiction that was just a little too hot to handle.

For a more serious take on this turn of events, take a look at PAYOR's timeline of censorship aimed at minority groups.

Library fire destroys gay books [Chicago Tribune]

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Your ability to update your MySpace page during work? Being able to hit up BitTorrent for and endless supply of gay porn? Surely you don't take those freedoms for granted, because so much of the world will never be allowed to do any of that, let alone have an email account that goes unmonitored or read any online news source of their choosing.

It doesn't begin and end with Google pairing up with the Chinese government to offer a toned down version of its search engine. From Cuba – where a "black market in Internet access has sprung up," which we've seen first-hand – to Vietnam and China, many of the world's citizens with access to the Internet aren't seeing the whole picture, thanks to government censorship.

But America's federal government isn't the only bloated bureaucracy that has a hard time with tech. Since many countries rely on out-of-the-box solutions – the same software moms and dads pick up at Best Buy – they're easily circumvented.

But it's still too soon to know whether censors will be able to keep the Web under heel. Most governments are not sophisticated in their attempts at censorship—they rely on simple filtering technologies that can be defeated by a determined political opposition. Even in China, information is seeping through. The regime is having trouble staying on top of the 111 million residents now online—less than 10 percent of the country's population. It's hard to imagine how it will keep up as that number swells.

Though if you read the New York Times Magazine article on Internet censorship in China, the picture seems a little brighter: citizens, it's argued, just don't want to escape the censorship. Or at least that's true for citizens willing to have their names in print.

The Web Police [The Atlantic]