It’s getting hard to keep up.

Just this past weekend, a second Colorado pastor had to step down from his evangelical church due to an unscheduled outing from the closet.

“I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy,” confessed Paul Barnes, in a videotape message played on Sunday for his congregation. “I can’t tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away.”

We can think of a lot of reasons for hardline evangelicals to cry themselves to sleep. The least of which would be a little harmless R&R with one of the boys. Just for starters, wasn’t being born the first time traumatic enough without wanting to repeat the trip?

It seems every time we turn around, some new evangelical blowhard — someone you never heard of, from the back of beyond — is catching media fire with an even nuttier stand against Darwin, or medical research, or Walmart (which we have learned not only sells the Brokeback Mountain DVD to “families” but has begun actively “pushing the gay agenda”, according to WorldNetDaily, a Christian publication currently in the throes of “Operation Just Say Merry Christmas.”) (more…)

Give us shelter.

In an important and clarifying article that appears this month in The New York Review of Books, author Mark Danner contends that there has really been two wars going on in Iraq.

An imaginary war — the one which the administrations touts, full of “turning points’ and “dead-enders” in their “last throes” — and the actual war on the ground, the one that reporters report, the one exploding nightly outside the 4-mile-square perimeter known as the Green Zone, a vast bunker, redundantly fortified, with no windows looking out.

So invested is the administration in its own imaginary narrative, Danner argues, that our government is unable to figure out not only when or how possibly this war could end, but where it began: (more…)

Has the anti-gay marriage strategy finally backfired?

For the Republicans last night, getting anti-gay amendments passed in six states proved to be the booby prize. The amendments carried but they didn’t necessarily bring Republican candidates with them — which was the whole point of this cynical exercise in gaybaiting. Let’s look at the tally.

Of the seven states considering gay marriage bans only Arizona rejected the measure, by a narrow margin, becoming the first state to do so.

The states that passed anti-gay measures were Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia and Wisconsin.

But by the end of the evening, the legislation ushered in 30 Democrats, as well as 33 Republicans (see breakdown, below) — something of a wash for White House strategist Karl Rove, who has built a career on gay-baiting the Republican base and gay-slurring Democratic opponents. (more…)

Girl, it’s raining MEN!

Not just men: Gay men! Sodomites! Flippin’ Freakin’ Q*U*E*E*R*S!

And the women of Golconda — that town in Magritte’s painting where it’s always raining what look like stockbrokers — the women are totally losing it. They are going around that final bend. They are — in a word — concerned.

Sisters in alarm with our very own Betty Crocker division of professional homophobes, the Concerned Women of America. (more…)

Newsflash to Focus on the Family: Homosexuality is widespread throughout the animal kingdom.

This should be old news to everyone else, and would only have been a flash circa 1973, but it’s causing havoc with the Left Behind crowd.

The Christian fundies, that is, their Norwegian counterparts, are raising a fuss in Oslo where a Natural History museum has opened an exhibit to illustrate the universality of animal homosexuality with dioramas and a wealth of photos.

“Homosexuality has been observed for more than 1,500 animal species,” says the exhibition’s project leader Geir Soeli, “and is well documented for 500 of them.” (more…)

Actually, one in ten straight men have sex with men ONLY! That is one of the jaw-dropping conclusions of a survey of 4200 men, detailed exhaustively in the Annals of Internal Medicine this month.

We provide a little visual aid at right, courtesy of a Bruce Weber wall poster, On Leave in Waikiki, in case it slipped your mind exactly what makes straight men so fabulicious.

All the men in the sex survey lived in the five boroughs of New York City — in other words, a wide cross section of social classes from blue-collar to executives with advanced degrees — were contacted by telephone, and, when necessary, were interviewed in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Polish, and Haitian Creole.

The purpose of the survey, initially, was to determine how to reach under-served — and perhaps hidden and neglected — populations who might have a higher risk of contracting HIV. The findings, however, were more akin to the Kinsey Report: (more…)

We have to give the media an A (not the same thing as an A+) on the way they handled the marriage this past Saturday of two Spanish airmen in Seville.

Both Reuters, which specified no author for its report, and Daniel Woolls of the Associated Press did a sober and lively job reporting a historic, but by no means world-ending, event.

If we have any quibble (we are withholding the plus sign on that A — and by the way, the mark will go on their records), it’s with the headline writer for the Reuters piece:

The headline ran: Flamenco Flamboyance at Spain Gay Military Wedding

Of course, everyone knows that gay men are always, by definition, flamboyant. We park our cars flamboyantly, show up at work in velveteen outfits with ruffs, and order coffee at Starbucks with ze little finger crooked just so.

The “Flamenco flamboyance” the headline writer was straining to hype (winking at the yahoos is getting much harder these days) was, in fact, a rather ordinary and traditional feature of weddings in Seville. The lead sentence of the piece tried valiantly — and was probably rewritten at the last minute by the editor — to cover for the headline writer’s exuberance: (more…)

Things To Do This Summer:

1. Do everyone who looks like a Glen Hanson illustration (right), and everybody who doesn’t. Get out there and spread the joy, boy!

2. Catch Project Runway from its first show, Wednesday, July 12, and never miss an episode. Can there ever be enough dizzy male designers breaking into showtunes as they cut along the bias and compete for the top spot? Exactly how obnoxious is the humorless Heidi Klum, the mistress of ceremonies whose pregnancy was forced on us last season in supposedly “edgy” maternity-wear? (No, gals, pregnant women are not all beautiful, no matter what you try to tell yourself.) And of course, Tim Gunn, who is always so earnest and prissy as he gives the budding designers his professional opinion before each competition. We love Tim. How could anyone not love him? How could anyone not want him as their personal ‘mo coach? (more…)