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When newly minted Philadelphia Eagle and one of the hottest men in creation, Jeremy Bloom, doesn't actually stab the President during a photo opportunity, there is much wailing and gnashing of queer teeth.
"Gay Erectile Dysfunction - When the guy who makes your pee pee stand at attention doesn't hate Bush as much as you do." - Tom, Commenting at Towleroad
Reported at Towleroad, completely unironically: "Scientists have discovered more rings around Uranus."
Andy posted about Willie Nelson's new Valentine's Day song, an ode to the spirit of "Brokeback Mountain" titled "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other)."
It premiered on iTunes today and also on Howard Stern. Which means, of course, that we bring the audio to you.
[Listen – 3:45, 1.7mb, MP3 format]
While performing the morning ritual of flipping through my feed-reader, I noticed Andy Towle link this story about gay activists protesting a South African ban on gay men donating blood. Andy (and gay activists) referred to the ban as "discrimination."
Gay men are banned for something, so it must be wrong, no?
Not so fast. In this article in the Advocate, a gay graduate student sets out to uncover the animus behind the ban on blood donations from gay men and discovers there is a valid scientific rationale:
What I found is that there is, in fact, good science to support these policies. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the most recent U.S. study, conducted in 2003, men who have sex with men accounted for approximately two thirds of all HIV infections among men, although only 5% to 7% of men in the United States identify themselves as men who have sex with men. (Obviously their surveys underestimate the true number of men who have sex with men, but even accounting for this error, the data is overwhelming.) The CDC’s statistical models predict that if the criterion was relaxed to exclude only those who have had man-to-man sex in the past five years, the worst-case scenario would mean an additional 1,200 units of HIV-positive blood in the system—a potential disaster.
The entire article deserves a thorough reading for its honesty, concern for scientific facts, and this perfect encapsulation of the issue:
So, as is all too often the case, there’s a slippage between what my emotional gut told me and what scientific evidence suggests is the truth. The lesson there is to get the facts before leaping to conclusions based on our emotional reactions.
Emotionalism is fine sometimes, but not when scientific data are involved. Merely seeing a story and crying discrimination before we even bother to uncover the truth of a matter is bad for gays everywhere. Science must come before political agenda, otherwise we are little different from the ID nutters out there who wish to place their beliefs before empirical data.
Reason #4,295,322 I'm a White Sox fan:
The Chicago Trib's Dawn Turner Trice says she believes that the key to the White Sox's winning season is the fact that Guillen makes a point to kiss nearly every player on the team, and doesn't stop there:
I noticed the kissing for the first time Saturday night, but I kept it to myself because before the pennant race, I hadn't been watching baseball games from beginning to end. I thought maybe kissing was the new thing from the new metrosexual male athlete.
I suspect this has more to do with Venezuelan cultural differences.
Still, if I had Jon Garland and Scott Podsednik on my roster, I'm not sure I could resist man-handling them either.
A full two months before Brokeback Mountain's theatrical premiere, Andy has a review. Despite the constant hype he has fueled, he says the movie delivers:
Lee's adaptation is everything I wanted it to be — stunning visually, emotionally solid, true to the original story — but at its core it expresses a knowledge of the secrecy and the gut-wrenching pain that gays experience when required to abide by society's heterosexual models for fear that their true feelings, if exposed, will engender shame, humiliation, or violence. This film begins in the early 60's but we all know that even today there are men who live entire lives in the closet, never able to allow life its full expression. [...]
And then there's the sex. For the first time, two young A-list actors rising in their careers have taken on roles that require them to not only sell an audience their affection, but also their overt sexual undertakings.
Consider me sold.
Me too.
And the early word from others is just as positive.
You first saw the stills on Towleroad, and now The Malcontent (as schizoid a blog as ever there was) brings you just a little more: more stills of the nearly naked Jamie Bamber on basic cable's Battlestar Galactica, plus Bamber's star-making video (sampled at just a little higher quality than normal, for no particular reason).
[Watch video – 6.7mb, 1:19, WMV format]
And the husband asks why I like sci-fi? (Click to enlarge.)
Oops!
Going bald? I don't care!
Bamber's Member: If a genie gave me three wishes, one would surely be for Time Warner Cable to switch the Sci-Fi Channel over to high definition!
OK, I am not going to tread anywhere near BoiFromTroy's turf, as it were. But I have one sports passion, and one sports passion only (which is one more than most gay men), and today I need to blog about it:
So anyway, this is such bullshit. ESPN The Magazine has picked my Minnesota Vikings to win Super Bowl XL, so when do I first get a chance to see this juggernaut on national television? November 21! (By the way, the actual ESPN link is available to subscribers only. They claim you can register for "free." But in ESPN-land, "free" means "$39.95.")
By that date, I will have had a chance to see those idiotic Dirty Birds from Atlanta three times, with a fourth game on Nov. 24 (can you tell I'm still bitter about having to cancel my ticket to Miami a few years back?), and the Philadelphia Eagles five times, with a sixth game on Nov. 27. Granted, as a New Yorker, I can probably see them play the Giants on Nov. 13. (Don't even get me started on the lame "NFL Sunday Pass" contract that shuts cable viewers out until at least 2010.)
I know there is "parity" in the NFL, but clearly it doesn't apply to the television contract. And I know there is the simple matter of disparate market sizes, etc. etc., but that doesn't mean I like it. I am The Malcontent, after all.
The odds-makers also have very good things to say about the Vikes, mainly because of their off-season revamp of their defense. The gayer I've become, the less in tune I have been with sports in general, but it's nice to see names I recognize like Kevin Williams, Pat Williams, Napoleon Harris, Fred Smoot and Darren Sharper potentially forming the new Purple People-Eaters.
So my love of the Vikings is the only thing that comes even close to BfT's Trojan boosterism. (He did name his site and pattern his colors after his team, after all. Then again, my site is purple ...) Nothing else for me comes close sports-wise – except for the two times I watched the Twins win the World Series. Now that was a sportgasm.
I haven't mentioned this to my future football widow yet, but for those of you that are here for politics or video clips or gay issues or pictures of hot young men, you're on notice that I will probably dedicate at least some attention to the Vikes. That is, until they flame out and fluke their way into a first-round wildcard loss, like they usually do.
(Do I sound like Andy Towle does when he tries to talk politics?)
Towle's Law: As an online discussion on a gay-oriented Website grows larger, the probability that it will turn to the demonizing of gay Republicans approaches 1. (See "Godwin's Law.")
Andy links to a story about the thriving, albeit underground, gay scene in Shanghai. How far is that from Beijing, again?
On my agenda today: breakfast at McDonald's (it's Sunday morning here), because the same bizarre meal repeated twice daily gets old. It's true, I never thought I would be wistful for America's version of "Chinese" food!
Then I'm going to learn how to tell a cabbie to take me to the Great Wall and back. Anything else today will be gravy. Except the American kind with big brown lumps, not the transparent viscous kind that tastes like puke.
If I'm really lucky, maybe I'll meet another jet-lagged American who will accompany me on a breathless foreign adventure involving hotel bars and karaoke, a la Lost in Translation. But more likely, I'll just wind up back here watching a random Affectional Film.
Towleroad has some exclusive photos of the molten-hot Jeff from Survivor Palau.
The guy was pretty damn tasty on a starvation diet, so you can imagine what being back in civilization has done for him!
When I wasn't jumping off the sofa in fright at the wicked thunderstorm that rocked Manhattan last night, I was cowering under a blanket.
Andy Towle, however, did something far more useful: He got out his camera and caught this awesome spectacle:
[HT: GayOrbit]
Andy Towle is all over the ongoing story of Zach Stark, who was forced by his parents into the "Love in Action" camp that seeks to make straighties out of gays through sexual alchemy or some sort of magical ju-ju.
Zach's brain is just now passing through the spin cycle and he is due to be released soon. Towleroad covers a story by Good Morning America with interviews of two L.I.A. alums, Brandon Tidwell and Gerard Wellman. Tidwell never really bought into the whole thing, while Wellman, who is apparently held out as something of a success, still admits an "attraction" to men but claims he has "guardrails" for his behavior. (Didn't Grace Kelly have guardrails too? --ed.)
Most startling of all, the camp's founder claims only a 65 percent success rate, although Tidwell dismisses that number and says that past L.I.A. indoctrinees are not monitored. (I can just see how they would be monitored: Some fundie wacko skulking outside the bushes of an alum's home, listening intently for the sound of two different baritone moans coming from inside ...)
