Alabama's First Married Same-Sex Couple: ‘It's Really Bittersweet'
Gay marriage in Alabama is legal (even if not everyone thinks so)!

After the U.S. Supreme Court said it would not block a ruling by a Federal District Court judge who said the ban in the state on same-sex marriage was unconstitutional on Monday, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore issued an order to state probate judges saying it wasn’t mandatory for them to uphold that ruling. But in Montgomery County on Monday, Tori Sisson and Shanté Wolfe legally shared their vows and spoke with HuffPost Live about the “bittersweet” moment.

As the couple of two years celebrated their new and legal union, Sisson and Wolfe weren’t reticent to acknowledge those still affected by existing homophobic sentiment and laws.

“It’s bittersweet because there are couples who are together longer than I have lived who didn’t get to see this day,” Wolfe told host Josh Zepps on Tuesday, later recalling how they spoke to a couple afraid to get married out of fear of losing their jobs.

When asked what they have to say to Alabama’s gay marriage opponents, Sisson defiantly stated, “Our love has nothing to do with you.”

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In the Fight Against HIV/AIDS, We’re All In This Together

Justin Lofton considers himself a “warrior” against HIV/AIDS, a fitting term for a young gay Black man living in Mississippi.
HRC.org

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Crappy Romance Novelist Nicholas Sparks Sued For Brewing “A Veritable Cauldron Of Bigotry”

This just in: Life is nothing like a Nicholas Sparks novel. Just ask Mr. Sparks himself. In a new lawsuit, the bestselling romance author has been accused by the former headmaster at his Christian prep school of brewing “a veritable cauldron of bigotry,” New York Magazine reports. And for some reason, we’re not surprised.

It all started back in 2006 when Sparks, who once said he would never dare write a story featuring two people of the same sex falling in love, dumped $10 million of his own money into launching the Epiphany School, a Christian prep school in New Bern, North Carolina.

In just a few years, Epiphany developed a reputation for being a shelter for conservative Christians to protect their children from the real world. Bill Hawkins, a pastor at First Presbyterian in New Bern, went so far as to the school “a community where a fundamentalist minority spoke with a loud voice.”

Just what the world needs, right? Another community of fundamentalists loudly spewing their nonsense and spreading a message of hate.

In 2012, Sparks wanted to build more global recognition for his cult Epiphany. So he decided to hire a new headmaster. Saul Hillel Benjamin was recommended to him by a headhunter. As New York Magazine describes him, Benjamin was “a 64-year-old Jewish-born Quaker who’d studied at both Kenyon and Oxford.” He’d worked in Bill Clinton’s Department of Education, served as a professor at the historically black Bennett College, and was a poet to boot.

With such a strong liberal arts background, Benjamin didn’t seem like the most obvious choice to helm a Christian school, but Sparks, whose belief in humanity is unwavering, was willing to take a chance. He offered him a package including a four-year contract, as well as a secondary job at the Nicholas Sparks Foundation, and a salary of more than $250,000, plus housing.

Naturally, Benjamin accepted the position. And he and Sparks became fast friends. They would often have dinner together, hang out in Sparks’ infinity pool, and even cruise around in Sparks’s “extraordinarily gorgeous black Bentley,” as Benjamin described it.

“It was pretty remarkable how close we were,” Benjamin told New York Magazine.

Soon, Benjamin and Sparks began spitballing ideas on how to improve Epiphany. Some of Benjamin’s ideas included increasing diversity (of the school’s 514 students, only two were black) and building its library, both of which Sparks agreed with.

Last school year, Benjamin began implementing his ideas. He started by trying to convince trustees to adopt a nondiscrimination policy that included sexual orientation and start a gay-straight alliance. Shortly after doing so, he received an email from Sparks.

“You have to first win their hearts,” he wrote. “Some [people] perceive … an agenda that strives to make homosexuality open and accepted … The [board] will not sanction a club or association for GLBT students.”

“As for the club,” he added, “there obviously can’t be one now.”

As the school year progressed, Sparks and Benjamin’s relationship became more strained, with the bestselling author claiming he was constantly dousing “raging infernos” started by Benjamin.

In one e-mail, Sparks demanded to know why Benjamin was spending so much time lecturing people about “tolerance, diversity, non-discrimination”?

“There was no simmering, hidden problem,” he insisted. “It is, and has been since its founding, a kind school, where everyone is kind.”

Then, in November 2013, Sparks’s soon-to-be-ex-wife Cathy surprised Benjamin at his home. She was accompanied by one of the school’s trustees. They had one question for the rabble-rousing headmaster: Do you believe in God?

“Yes,” he replied. Then he added: “But it’s an answer that takes some explaining.”

That, it seems, was the last straw. Three days later, Benjamin was called before an assembly to explain his beliefs.

“I’ve never experienced so much vitriol about my heritage or my faith in people’s ability to learn,” he said.

Two days after that, Benjamin claims he was brought into a conference room and “held hostage” by Sparks who blocked the door screaming: “You bastard! You liar!”

“It was the most frightening moment of my life,” Benjamin says.

So he resigned.

(Sparks, of course, denies this dramatic scene ever happened, suggesting that Benjamin suffers from Alzheimer’s, like one of the characters in The Notebook.)

This past fall, Benjamin filed a lawsuit against Epiphany, claiming the school violated his contract and calling it “a veritable cauldron of bigotry.”

“I saw real ugliness,” he said.

Bullying, too, was a very common problem, despite Sparks’ claim that Epiphany was “a kind place.”

Sparks’ lawyer calls allegations “absurd.” Sparks himself is trying to put the whole incident behind him, hiring a new “solid Christian educator” as headmaster and focusing on saving his crumbling marriage (he and Cathy separated earlier this year) and writing more crappy romance novels about heterosexual white people living in small Southern towns.

To quote Mr. Sparks himself, sometimes “it has to get ugly before it gets pretty!”

Related stories:

Don’t Expect A Gay Romance Novel From Nicholas Sparks Anytime Soon

The Horrors Inside A Christian Conversion Cult Are Exposed First-Hand

10 Bible-Based Reasons Why Christians Should Love Homosexuality

Graham Gremore

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ESPN Reveals The True Identity of Katy Perry's Super Bowl Sharks: VIDEO

Sean Mandell

www.towleroad.com/2015/02/espn-spoofs-katy-perrys-superbowl-sharks-video.html

A Valentine Card to All the Straight Men in My Life

Image courtesy Joey Leblanc

This Valentine card is for the straight men in my life who loved me before I knew how to love myself, and who gently nudged, but never forced me to stand up and step out before I was ready. You were there in grade school and high school and college, too. You were there after I was married and started having children, and you were there so much longer than anyone would ever expect.

25 years after I finished college, I finally found the nerve to tell one of my best college buddies that I was gay.

Once in the seventh grade, I rather vaguely told my best friend Bruce McLeod that I didn’t really feel any “special thing” for all the girls I seemed to be so flirtatious with. He knew exactly what I was saying, even though I was still too naive to have figured it out for myself. Yet, he only nodded, and then nothing changed that day or that month or that year. And though he moved away a few years later, we remain grown-up, childhood friends even now.

Another time, 25 years after I finished college, I finally found the nerve to tell one of my best college buddies that I was gay. We were at Logan airport where we met from time to time when he was home for a visit. When I told him, he laughed and slapped his hand on the table and said: “Me too.”

In college, we had been together constantly — enjoyed the same things, had a perfectly-matched, if slightly sarcastic, sense of humor, loved Diana Ross and the Supremes and considered each other close friends. But, apparently not quite close enough. He died a few years after our airport meeting, and to this day I miss him and also miss the fun and mutual support we could, but never did, have because we were just too scared.

This love note is also for all the straight classmates I secretly admired, envied and even had a crush on. At the time, I didn’t wonder so much about why I got picked close to last for any sports activities, but I did wonder why you and I were so different. It was as if you had some mysterious “man gene” that I was missing that explained why you liked Phys Ed and cars and Playboy. It was the gene that caused guys to be rough and tough and to punched each other in the arm, and it explained why you spent most of your time thinking and talking about, (although, I’ve learned, not so much doing) things with girls.

And now together we are teaching each other that it’s not really about straight men or gay men or all the men in between, it’s simply about men being who they are: honest-to-God real men.

Looking back, I’ve also figured out that I made a few of you very uneasy because you were secretly wrestling with the very same things that confused and troubled me. But with most of you this was simply a time of missed opportunities for us both. It’s true that you didn’t give me much of a chance, but it’s also true that I didn’t give you much room either.

Well, that’s water well over the dam and seems like a very long time ago. And lately, thanks to social media, we’ve begun to connect and talk to each other, really for the first time, and guess what, the years have been kind, and most of us make much better grownups then we did high school students.

And, finally, this letter is for all the new straight friends I’ve made since I came out. We met when the playing field was more level, and I was more real and more present. We became friends easily without a lot of effort and you have enriched my life; you make me laugh, and we keep each other focused on the things that really count, like family, friends, kindness and love. And for me what’s the most fun about being your friend is that you never knew me as a make-believe, straight man — you’ve only known me as an honest-to-God real man.

And that brings me to the real point of this open love letter. You guys have taught me more than you’ll ever know. Even when I wasn’t paying much attention, I was learning. And this is what I learned: When my overactive, analytical mind quiets down, I see that we have more in common than not. Who knew that all this time we actually were on the same team? And now, together, we are teaching each other that it’s not really about straight men or gay men or all the men in between, it’s simply about men being who they are: honest-to-God real men.

_____

Author’s Note: It’s important to emphasize that I speak only for myself and not for other gay men who grew up in different times or under different circumstances — many of whom do like football, were picked first and who still love to punch each other in the arm with an ease that, to this day, I envy and admire. And I am also sending a special love note to all the wonderful women in my life. You definitely know who you, are and even though you could tell a story or two, I am, for the moment, hopeful you won’t. XO, Paul.

www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-boynton/a-valentine-card-to-all-the-straight-men-in-my-life_b_6654056.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Celebrate Real Love This Valentine’s Day

Celebrate real love with HRC by sending us photos of you and your Valentine now through Saturday, February 14.
HRC.org

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We Did It First: Five Ways Gay Culture Influenced “50 Shades Of Grey”

All across the country, randy theatergoers are flocking to their local suburban movie complexes to see the film adaptation of E.L. James’ internationally bestselling novel 50 Shades of Grey starring dreamboat Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson.

But what few fans of the book (and now movie) may realize is that even though 50 Shades of Grey features a young heterosexual couple, it’s actually a very gay-inspired story.

Scroll down for five ways in which gay culture has influenced what is sure to become the #1 movie at this week’s box office…

Folsom Street Fair

While suburban housewives across America have been getting all hot and bothered reading what many gay men would consider to be mild BDSM sex scenes at best, we’ve been publicly embracing hardcore kinky behavior since before 21-year-old Fifty Shades of Grey protagonist Anastasia Steele was even born.

San Francisco’s annual BDSM street fair has taken sex to the extreme for over 30 years, becoming the world’s largest leather event. For more than three decades, gay leather daddies and their man slaves have flogged, er, flocked to the heart of SOMA, a neighborhood once famous for it’s raunchy leather bars, to party with other like-minded sadomasochists.

George Michael‘s song “Father Figure”

In the book, 27-year-old Christian Grey becomes Anastasia’s father figure by impressing her with his boundless wealth, taking her for a ride on his private helicopter, and, of course, claiming her virginity. But what naive, young Ana doesn’t realize is that many of Grey’s slick moves are borrowed straight from George Michael‘s “Father Figure” music video. Of course, how would she know this? “Father Figure” came out in 1988, when Ana was still just a twinkle in her biological daddy’s eye.

The average lifespan of a gay relationship

50 Shades of Grey takes place over the course of a month, with Ana falling in love with Christian by week two and breaking it off with him by week four. Not to perpetuate stereotypes, but this is on par with the average lifespan of many gay relationships.

Gay sex clubs and bath houses

Audiences were shocked — shocked! — to read about Christian Grey’s “playroom” dedicated exclusively to housing all his fetish gear and other sex toys. But what many readers didn’t seem to realize is that gay men pretty much invented the idea of a “playroom” with sex clubs and bathhouses. (That’s right, Christian Grey has a room. We have whole houses.)

Bathhouses became a popular hangout for gay men in America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when homosexual acts were still illegal. By the 1950s, they were popping up all across the country, and by the late 1960s and early 1970s, many had become staple institutions within the gay community.

Gay pulp fiction

Before there was the internet, gay men got their rocks off by watching VHS porno tapes or paging through dirty magazines. And before that, they got their kicks from erotic pulp fiction.

Sexy dime-store novels featuring gay characters like All Shades of Gay, Locker Room Lovers, Beefcake Boys and Hollywood Homo helped pave the way for more mainstream erotica like Fifty Shades of Grey.

You’re welcome, E.L. James

Graham Gremore

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