Colton Haynes Is Twice The Fun, Hugh Jackman Picked Up A New Trick

This week, Channing Tatum thinks people are nicer when they’re naked, Lily Tomlin compared Grace and Frankie to AbFab and Jim Parsons revealed how he met his partner and made us want to barf. Here’s what happened recently on Instagram:

Jesse Metcalfe knows how to make a splash.

A photo posted by Jesse Metcalfe (@realjessemetcalfe) on Jun 6, 2015 at 3:38pm PDT

If only Benjamin Godfre was in the new Star Wars movie.

A photo posted by Marc Jacobs (@themarcjacobs) on Jun 18, 2015 at 6:55pm PDT

That time Chloe met Mark Jacobs…

A photo posted by Marc Jacobs (@themarcjacobs) on Jun 18, 2015 at 6:55pm PDT

Every inch of Tyson Beckford belongs to Chippendales.

@chippendales thanx for the comfortable underwear??????

A video posted by Tyson C. Beckford (@tysoncbeckford) on Jun 15, 2015 at 9:21pm PDT

  Johnny Weir just threw on something that was hanging in his closet.

  About last night: Rubber top @motoguo Short @mikiosakabe Wedge @chanelofficial Bag @hermes Hair @mariolazysk Face @elenamiglino   A photo posted by JOHNNY WEIR (@johnnygweir) on Jun 18, 2015 at 6:19am PDT

Hugh Jackman picked up a new trick.

Awesome day one junketing for @PanMovie. Thank you Sebastian Tabany for the magic trick. #JustTheBeginning   A video posted by Hugh Jackman (@thehughjackman) on Jun 13, 2015 at 5:43pm PDT

Two Colton Haynes is much better than one.

  Workout Wednesday   A photo posted by Colton Haynes (@coltonlhaynes) on Jun 17, 2015 at 8:17pm PDT

Pretty Ritchie and Ugly Betty enjoyed ice cream on a break from filming their new series.

Not only do I work with some amazing individuals, I also get to have ice cream while I work. Today was fun. #tough-life I love this pic @americaferrera ??? Thanks @rickygervais for turning #humpday into #icecreamtruckday ! U da man! Chocolate shake for @officialraulcastillo – bananas foster sundae for me! Slaving away on #SpecialCorrespondents A photo posted by Raúl Castillo (@officialraulcastillo) on Jun 17, 2015 at 2:56pm PDT

Brad Goreski is plush in blush.

  Feeling plush in blush! @dsquared2 #NYC   A photo posted by Brad Goreski (@mrbradgoreski) on Jun 17, 2015 at 5:17pm PDT

Steve Grand obviously raided Johnny Weir’s closet.

#befierce #photoshoot #BenjiKnewman A photo posted by Steve Grand (@stevegrandmusic) on Jun 18, 2015 at 2:15am PDT

Miley Cyrus offered Andy Cohen pointers on taking tongue-in-cheek selfies.

A photo posted by Andy Cohen (@bravoandy) on Jun 17, 2015 at 11:52am PDT

Ah, that’s where you’ve been hiding, Ryan Lochte.

Enjoying the beautiful view of Monaco #relaxation A photo posted by @ryanlochte on Jun 17, 2015 at 9:14am PDT

James Franco‘s officially gone to the dogs.

A photo posted by James Franco (@jamesfrancotv) on Jun 17, 2015 at 6:53am PDT

Jordan Knight and NKOTB are coming for you.

Cleveland, Philly, New York!! We’re coming for you! ???????????????? #themainevent #NKOTB #jordanknight #joeymcintyre #donniewahlberg #jonathanrknight #dannywood A photo posted by Jordan Knight (@jordanknightofficial) on Jun 16, 2015 at 11:49pm PDT

Alex Minsky doesn’t like to share.

A video posted by Alex Minsky (@mminskyy) on Jun 17, 2015 at 9:16am PDT

Jeremy Kinser

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/8gRbY68duh8/colton-haynes-is-twice-the-fun-hugh-jackman-picked-up-a-new-trick-20150620

United Protestant Church of Belgium To Allow Ordination of Openly Gay Men and Women

(Image via Evangelical Focus / EPUB)

The United Protestant Church of Belgium (UPC) has voted to allow openly gay and lesbian people to be ordained, reports Gay Star News.

Delegates at the church’s Synod voted to send a recommendation to all UPC congregations informing them of the new policy.

Church president Steven Fuite said he was “proud of my church as well as the openness and respect in which the hearing took place.”

In 2003, Belgium became the second country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage.

The post United Protestant Church of Belgium To Allow Ordination of Openly Gay Men and Women appeared first on Towleroad.

Michael Fitzgerald

United Protestant Church of Belgium To Allow Ordination of Openly Gay Men and Women

PHOTOS: Historic and Naked

bway_leadx400.jpg

Christopher Harrity

www.advocate.com/broadway/2015/06/18/photos-historic-and-naked

Eleanor Roosevelt, The First Lady of Gay Rights
The story was co-written by Timothy Dwyer, co-author of Hissing Cousins: The Untold Story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Longworth (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)

June marks the start of Gay Pride season, with parades from Boston and Los Angeles to Tel Aviv and Oslo. It’s a good bet that somewhere over those rainbows, Eleanor Roosevelt’s spirit will be marching, too. She’s appeared off and on over the decades, whether loud and proud on posters reclaiming her as an uncelebrated lesbian or more demurely as a sort of mascot for branches of the Eleanor Roosevelt Democratic Club.

But this year, she deserves a special place of pride. June will also see the Supreme Court’s thumbs-up or down ruling on gay marriage. Though Roosevelt was an extraordinary champion of African-American and women’s rights, she also did more than almost anyone in the pre-Stonewall era to model acceptance of gay relationships — and she did it in the White House.

Some would argue that was because the First Lady was a closeted lesbian. The most often-cited evidence is her intense friendship with an openly lesbian reporter named Lorena Hickok. Roosevelt and Hick worked together, vacationed together and wrote each other hundreds of letters, many of them as purple as a late-summer eggplant. “Gee! What wouldn’t I give to talk to you & hear you now, oh, dear one,” said one from Eleanor. “It is all the little things, tones in your voice, the feel of your hair, gestures, these are the things I think about & long for.” The First Lady got Hick a job reporting from around the country on the progress of the New Deal. Back in Washington, she bunked in a guest room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And the rumors began. “And so you think they gossip about us?” Eleanor wrote to Lorena in November 1933. “I am always so much more optimistic than you are. I suppose because I care so little what ‘they’ say!”

Over the years, the gossip has hardened into gospel. In 1998, Eleanor earned a spot alongside James Baldwin, Willa Cather and Cole Porter on a National Coming Out Day poster with the headline, “Unfortunately, history has set the record a little too straight.” Five years ago, she shared top billing with Matthew Shepard, Cynthia Nixon and Maurice Sendak in the LGBT History Month celebration “31 Days, 31 Icons.” She also merited a section in Neil Miller’s 2005 book Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present. Ask people today what they know about Eleanor Roosevelt and her sexuality invariably makes the short list.

Among folks who knew her, however, the consensus went the other way. Eleanor’s children dismissed the idea that their mother was a lesbian; her son John believed that his mother did have an affair — with her male body guard, a man named Earl Miller. (One of Miller’s soon-to-be-ex-wives, citing allegedly steamy letters between him and Eleanor, threatened to name the former First Lady as a co-respondent in their divorce.) Alice Longworth, Eleanor’s first cousin and a woman so free-spirited she claimed to have been named the first “honorary homosexual” by a Washington gay-rights organization, couldn’t have been more insistent. “I don’t care what they say,” she said. “I simply cannot believe that Eleanor Roosevelt is a lesbian.”

Many of ER’s letters to Hick express a passionate friendship. But people making the case for Eleanor’s lesbianism tend to cherry-pick from her correspondence, overlooking passages where she acknowledges that Hick experienced “a feeling for me which for one reason or another I may not return in kind,” and suggesting that, “you should have had a husband & children & it would have made you happy if you loved him & in any case it would have satisfied certain cravings.”

Besides, Eleanor tended toward epistolary heavy-breathing in general, whether she was writing to her bodyguard or to her mother-in-law. “I do so want to kiss you,” she wrote once to Franklin’s mother, Sara Delano, “and in a little over a month I will be able to.”

Eleanor Roosevelt isn’t the only putatively straight historical figure to become a gay icon. Abraham Lincoln, Malcolm X, Katharine Hepburn and Anne Frank have all been posthumously embraced in some corners as unsung members of the larger gay family.

It’s an understandable impulse. Minority communities crave role models, both as inspiration to their own and a retort to narrow-minded outsiders. American Jews have long outed the undetected sons and daughters of Abraham. Think there’s a chance your favorite celebrity is Jewish? Check out heebz.com, which stockpiles the names of famous Jews “because,” the site explains, “you gotta celebrate every success.”

The irony is that Eleanor Roosevelt deserves to be a gay icon — even if she was 100 percent straight. Homosexuality may have been stigmatized, even criminalized, during her lifetime, but that didn’t stop her from befriending gay women regardless of what people thought of them or her. She lived for years with two out lesbians, Marion Dickerman and Nancy Cook, at her cottage in upstate New York, where the sheets and towels were monogrammed with the three women’s initials: EMN. Later, in Greenwich Village, two of her closest friends were another lesbian couple, Esther Lape and Elizabeth Read. (Take the Oscar Wilde Gay History Tour of New York and see where they lived.) She invited these women to inaugurations, to meet the King and Queen of England — anywhere she wanted the company of her closest friends.

We’ll probably never know if Eleanor shared their sexual orientation or if she just admired independent women. Whatever the case, her refusal to let the morals of the day define her was a remarkable kind of heroism, almost like a one-woman gay-straight alliance. As the Supreme Court prepares to give its final word on the acceptability of gay marriages, they’d do well to
remember her historic example, regardless of whom she did, and didn’t, sleep with.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-peyser/the-first-lady-of-gay-rights_b_7608122.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

EuroPride in Riga, Latvia draws 5,000 – as protestors burn rainbow flag

First post-Soviet country to host annual event

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jamiet

www.gaystarnews.com/article/europride-riga-latvia-draws-5000-%E2%80%93-protestors-burn-rainbow-flag200615

‘Queer Eye For The Straight Guy’ Helped Change A Generation Of Gay TV Viewers

Ted Allen, Jai Rodriguez, Carson Kressley, Thom Filicia, and Kyan Douglas in Queer Eye

“When we made Queer Eye, we never saw ourselves as important or as activists. We were proud of being out. We were the first television show, that I know of, that had an entirely openly gay cast… I’ll never forget the first time I watched Matt Lauer try to say the word ‘queer’ on TV. I mean, it’s not a word people threw around a lot, and it was a very political word. I didn’t like the title at the beginning. I’ve come to realize I was wrong, because I think the provocative nature of it was balanced with the sweetness of the way the show ran most of the time. It worked out… The main thing about Queer Eye that I will say is that, in an era before the Internet was everywhere, we heard from hundreds, probably thousands, of gay kids who said, ‘Thank you for putting some gay people on TV that my parents can actually like. Firefighters liked us, cops, marines. I mean, it was a very good show.”

— Queer Eye For The Straight Guy‘s Ted Allen, the show’s food and wine expert, recalls the impact of the groundbreaking series in a new interview with HuffPo

Jeremy Kinser

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/oQCg0nbvhgs/queer-eye-for-the-straight-guy-helped-change-a-generation-of-gay-tv-viewers-20150620

Sony Hack Reveals Spider-Man ‘Can’t Be Gay’

A leaked licensing agreement between Sony and Marvel regarding the web-slinging Spider-Man reveals that the superhero can’t be portrayed in film as gay reports Gawker. The agreement surfaced after Sony Pictures was hacked late last year, and reveals that the character is strictly limited to a set of mandatory characterizations, one of which is that he’s heterosexual.

While some classic characterizations of the character make sense, such as being raised by his aunt and uncle and attending college in New York, the agreement reiterates again in a later section that Peter Parker must be “caucasian and heterosexual.”

Gawker notes that the contract went into effect in September 2011 shortly after black-latino character Miles Morales donned the famous spider costume in a storyline in the comics. Internet fans campaigned for actor Donald Glover, who provided voiceover work for Miles’ character in a cartoon adaptation of the superhero, to take over Andrew Garfield’s spot after his final Spider-Man film. However, Sony is considering giving Ender’s Game lead Asa Butterfield the part.

The post Sony Hack Reveals Spider-Man ‘Can’t Be Gay’ appeared first on Towleroad.

Anthony Costello

Sony Hack Reveals Spider-Man ‘Can’t Be Gay’

LGBT Muslims And Jews Break Bread To Find Common Ground At Iftar Shabbat Dinner
At sunset on Friday evening, Muslims around the world broke their Ramadan fast with a ritual meal, called an iftar. At the same time, Jews around the world sat down for Shabbat dinner, the beginning of the weekly period of rest.

In one Los Angeles community, Muslims and Jews came together to celebrate both rituals and to find common ground as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people of faith and their allies. A kosher meal for about 30 diners had been planned, with dates to break the Ramadan fast and challah bread for Shabbat.

The combined iftar Shabbat was hosted by JQ International, an organization that co-founder Asher Gellis said brings LGBT Jews together to find support and community. It was the second such event the organization has hosted.

Recalling last year’s event, Gellis said, “We got to see what the Muslim community does to end Ramadan and to pray. … Then we did the Jewish blessings over the candle and the wine and the bread and shared what the meaning is behind those things.”

JQ organized the iftar Shabbat with Marium Mohiuddin, who is a Muslim, an LGBT ally and a Texas native.

“When you begin to tear down these walls, you get away from labeling people as the other and get to who they are,” Mohiuddin said.

She was volunteering with NewGround, a Muslim-Jewish advocacy group, when she met Gellis, who was looking to incorporate interfaith work into JQ’s programming. Mohiuddin, who had become passionate about LGBT issues during her college years, jumped at the opportunity and reached out to several of her gay Muslim friends to ask them to speak at the iftar Shabbat.

She had few Jewish friends before last year’s event, Mohiuddin said, and knew very little about their faith. “I have such a deeper understanding [now] of who they are, and it helps to let go of so much discrimination and prejudice,” she said.

LGBT Muslims and Jews can find common ground in their shared experience both as religious minorities in the United States and as minorities within their own faith traditions, Gellis said. Several gay and ally Muslims spoke at the first year’s event, and “a lot of our community members could relate to their experiences,” he said.

Gellis noted that LGBT acceptance in many Jewish communities has grown considerably over the years, especially with the emergence of groups like JQ. Similar resources exist for LGBT Muslims, although prejudice remains.

“What I can say from my experience as an LGBT person in the Muslim community is that it is not easy, nor would I really wish for someone to struggle with that,” said Joey Marsh, one of the speakers at the first iftar Shabbat. “It can be incredibly difficult to feel comfortable about yourself when you’re with a group of Muslims.”

The iftar Shabbat is one place where Muslims, Jews, LGBT people and allies can all feel welcome, Mohiuddin said. She remembered “hearing my friends’ stories and hearing how … each story [of coming out] is different, but there’s this internal struggle and that’s universal.” She said it shows “the humanity of a person behind their religion or their ethnicity.”

Gellis noted that participants can also be reminded of what Islam and Judaism, two often polarized faiths, have in common. Muslim guests at last year’s event had wanted to make sure there wasn’t any pork on the menu, he recalled with a chuckle.

“It was really funny ’cause it’s like, I think about that all the time as a Jewish person,” he said.

— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/20/iftar-shabbat-muslims-jews_n_7617480.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Scruffy Model Walter Delmar Makes Jorts Sexy

Walter Delmar took his buff and scruffy body to the L.A. River for a photo shoot  last week. It wasn’t the brightest summer day, but it didn’t matter. Moody grey skies suit Walter’s look better. Yes he’s wearing jorts, but the destructed denim only brings out the edgier side of his sex appeal, AKA his hair (both facial and body) and his tattoos. Combine with dark shoes and a black Calvin Klein brief, and the shoot’s like a modern classic.

Some guys think jorts are an eternal no-go, but this isn’t the case. As Walter Delmar shows, it’s perfectly possible to pull off a rugged-looking pair of denim bottoms. Of course, a ripped body like Walter’s makes a nice finishing touch. In the gallery below, each shot with Walter in the shorts makes sure to include his shoes: black combat boots. They up Walter’s masculinity even more, and make the jorts an even more appropriate choice. Going shirtless is also a fair option. Walter is stretching on the sand by a river after all.

You can see more of this photoshoot with Walter Delmar on The Underwear Expert.

Photo Credit: Himsight Photography

Underwear Expert

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Meet the First Out Trans Man to Compete on a U.S. College Men's Swimming Team

Harvard freshman Schulyer Bailar is making waves competing against other swimmers who share his gender identity.

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Mitch Kellaway

www.advocate.com/sports/2015/06/20/meet-first-out-trans-man-compete-us-college-mens-swimming-team