Sir Ian McKellen kisses male fans at Manchester Pride

Sir Ian McKellen knows how to celebrate Manchester Pride, taking full advantage of his position to kiss male fans along the route.

The X Men and Lord of the Rings star was the grand marshal, leading the parade throughout the northern English city in front of hundreds of thousands of spectators.

He had also designed the Gay Star News Pride tote bag, with the words ‘You Shall Not Pass… Anti-Gay Laws!’, taking on Gandalf’s famous line from the Fellowship of the Ring.

Speaking to GSN, in an exclusive interview, he gave his thoughts on the new Stonewall film, dressing in drag and being thrown out of Taylor Swift’s apartment.

He also gave his thoughts on Pride.

He said: ‘I suppose Pride is different for every person. Some people are just gawping. For me it’s a celebration: being out and not giving a damn. Being grateful that we’re in a country where that’s possible. But it does make me think. Three hours away in Moscow, they’re not going to have another pride march for 100 years, it’s been banned. I wouldn’t like to be growing up gay in Russia.

‘People say it’s all over here, but in Northern Ireland it’s not. Gay people can’t get married in Northern Ireland. Southern Ireland voted [yes] in the referendum and everyone was very proud. But in the north… So I think Pride’s about realizing you can’t take your rights for granted. Coming out, for me, and for a lot of people – it does politicize you. It makes you take an active interest in politics, because you watch the way your life and other gay people’s lives can be affected by it.

‘Politics is really about making connections. We’re all brothers, whatever we look like, however old we are or what our gender is. Rather than a community, it’s an international movement. And there will be some people today who come out. They come in from the countryside and by the end of the evening have made friends and think ‘I’m not on my own.’

Check out more of the best pictures from the Pride parade here.

Here’s McKellen in action, along with stars of popular UK TV soap Coronation Street, which is set in Manchester, newly out Rugby League star Keegan Hirst and other pride-goers:

The post Sir Ian McKellen kisses male fans at Manchester Pride appeared first on Gay Star News.

Joe Morgan

www.gaystarnews.com/article/sir-ian-mckellen-kisses-male-fans-at-manchester-pride/

Sex Abuse Charges Against HRC Co-Founder Terry Bean to be Dismissed

Terry Bean, a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser and co-founder of the Human Rights Campaign and the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund who was arrested last November on sex abuse charges involving a 15-year-old boy will have his case dismissed because the alleged victim refuses to testify.

Bean and his ex-boyfriend Kiah Loy Lawson were each charged with two counts of third-degree sodomy and third-degree sexual abuse.

The Oregonian reports:

The boy, now 17, has been on the run from detectives trying to serve a subpoena that would have required him to appear at the trial, which is scheduled to start Tuesday.

The boy doesn’t want testify and has attempted suicide because he’s traumatized by the prospect of being forced to appear, said his attorney, Lori Deveny.

Without him, the state can’t proceed.

Lane County Chief Deputy District Attorney Erik Hasselman said he met with the teenager earlier this month and assured him that the state won’t compel him to return for the trial. The boy lives in San Diego.

The prosecution will reportedly ask Circuit Judge Jay McAlpin to dismiss the case without prejudice so that the state has the possiblity to refile charges. Bean’s lawyers want the case dismissed outright.

The post Sex Abuse Charges Against HRC Co-Founder Terry Bean to be Dismissed appeared first on Towleroad.

Kyler Geoffroy

Sex Abuse Charges Against HRC Co-Founder Terry Bean to be Dismissed

WATCH: 5 LGBT Celebrities Share Their Coming-Out Stories

The process of coming out as gay, lesbian, bisexual or any other non-heteronormative sexual identity can be both daunting and cathartic. Even after mustering the courage to vocalize your truth, there is no crystal ball to anticipate the cacophony of reactions you might get — or how you might feel yourself. But the truth is that being who you really are always feels better than wearing a mask, as these celebrities can attest.

In the videos below, five LGBT stars open up to HuffPost Live about their coming out experiences. While no two accounts are the same, there is a common thread: All of their lives drastically improved once they embraced who they are.

Sir Ian McKellen is among today’s most recognizable LGBT icons. He’s been out publicly since 1988, which clearly hasn’t impeded a vastly successful career. And he remembers well the beautiful feeling of relief that came with announcing his sexuality. “[Coming out] was the best thing I ever did in my life, as every gay person will tell you. I grew up overnight, and was born again. Everything went better, and it felt as if a great millstone had dropped from my back that I didn’t know had been there.”

“I was about 12 when I realized what gay meant and that I had it. It felt like a disease to me,” Lynch remembered about discovering her sexuality. But she hopes that her own work through the years, most notably playing Sue Sylvester on “Glee,” can become signs of hope for the LGBT youth of today. “I’ve obviously turned out okay, I’m doing well. But I’m glad that [‘Glee’] and the fact that I’m out and open about it will perhaps ease the hearts and minds of some kids where it’s not so easy.“

For Major League Soccer star Robbie Rogers, coming out for the first time was easier with someone he didn’t know at all. He was at a London bar when he met a stranger who casually asked if he was gay or straight. After so much time spent hiding his identity, Rogers finally spoke his truth. “I had been thinking about it a lot. I just was so sick of lying that I wanted to get the ball moving. So then I said it and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, that felt so great to say that.’ … It felt so amazing, and I’m sure [this woman] didn’t realize what was going on.” He came out to his family a month later. 

“I was an angry person. I tried to control it. It’s interesting, some of my straight liberal friends urged me to not come out when they knew I was planning it, because they thought it would diminish my ability to be effective on other issues after I came out,” said former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank. “[They] said, ‘Well, we’re glad you did it, because you’re better at the job. You’re easier to get along with, you’re less likely to get angry, you accommodate disagreement better.‘ And I think that’s probably right.”

Also on HuffPost:

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Anti-gay Texas group asks for donations to support law that has already passed

A Texas anti-gay group have started fundraising to show their support for a ‘pastor protection law’ – which has already been signed into Texan law back in June.

The ‘pastor protection act’ allows clergy to refuse to officiate same-sex marriage on ‘religious’ grounds, and has received tremendous media coverage since Gov. Greg Abbot signed the act into law on 11 June, and will go into effect on 1 September.

Despite the previous publicity the act has found, Texas Values president Jonathan Saenz is asking his followers for $25,000 ‘to educate and empower every Texas pastor and church to boldly proclaim God’s truth about marriage.’

In an open letter on his group’s website, Saenz says: ‘America today is occupied territory. The enemies of religious freedom occupy every power center from government to academia.

‘So it’s not enough for only a few well-informed pastors to know about our state’s new Pastor Protection Law. Every member of the Texas clergy and every Texas church must know they’re shielded against being forced to solemnize, perform, or celebrate a same-sex ‘marriage’ in violation of their beliefs.

‘Every dollar will ensure more pastors, churches, and fellow Texans are equipped with the protections of this new law.’

Clergy are already allowed to refuse to perform same-sex marriages under the US constitution.

Saenz, whose ex-wife left him for another woman, is an avid supporter of ‘gay cure’ therapy.

He has also claimed that LGBTI people want to throw Christians into ‘concentration camps’ and has said that same-sex marriage will lead to people ‘marrying their stepchildren’.

The post Anti-gay Texas group asks for donations to support law that has already passed appeared first on Gay Star News.

Ashlee Kelly

www.gaystarnews.com/article/anti-gay-texas-group-asks-for-donations-to-support-law-that-has-already-passed/

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Just Ask One Of These Guys

Comma, comma, down dooby doo down down
Comma, comma, down dooby doo down down

Breakin’ up is hard to do

If you’ve experienced the exquisite joys of building a life with a lover, chances are you’v also endured the indescribable pain that comes with a breakup.

To appreciate the highs you must experience the lows, or some bullshit like that.

Below, guys who are going through it vent on Whisper.

What’s your worst breakup nightmare story?

Dan Tracer

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Rugby union star Sam Stanley comes out as gay

England Rugby Sevens star Sam Stanley has come out as gay – the first English professional rugby union player to do so.

Stanley, who has represented England five times internationally, has spoken of his anguish at hiding his sexuality.

Speaking to the Sunday Times, Stanley said: ‘I was 10 or 11 when I realised I was different to my friends.

‘I didn’t want to accept it, I felt that being different wasn’t right. I had a girlfriend and I was thinking that, like some people say, maybe it is just a phase.’

Stanley has also revealed he attempted suicide after fearing his sexuality would end his rugby career.

He told the Sunday Times: ‘I was standing on a bridge about four or five years ago, overlooking a motorway in Essex… However, looking back, the idea that I would jump was ridiculous but it was as if I was thinking that I could get rid of the pain in one go.

‘You are so worried about what people will think and I thought I couldn’t be a macho rugby player the way I was, and there was nothing else I wanted to do with my life.’

Saracens, where Stanley was a player between 2010 and 2014, have shown support to their old teammate, tweeting: ‘So #proud of @Stanley_13. Always a member of the #SarriesFamily.’

Sam’s brother Michael Stanley, who plays for Samoa, has also spoken of his pride for his brother, tweeting: ‘So proud of my little brother, not easy in this days society! Love you uce, be proud of who you are #FtheHaters @Stanley_13’

Stanley has come out less than a month after rugby league player Keegan Hirst, who had also struggled with being gay but has since received a lot of support.

The first rugby union player to come out as gay was former Wales captain Gareth Thomas, who came out in 2009.

The post Rugby union star Sam Stanley comes out as gay appeared first on Gay Star News.

Ashlee Kelly

www.gaystarnews.com/article/rugby-union-star-sam-stanley-comes-out-as-gay/

Giving Jimmy Carter Credit For Forty Years Of Support

After the flurry of news about Jimmy Carter’s acknowledgment that he has metastatic cancer, the media attention has died down. The former president has started receiving his first treatments to deal with the disease, and he’s even back to teaching Sunday school.

But by all accounts, Carter is facing an uphill battle from a combination of an aggressive disease and advanced age (he’s a month away from turning 91).

When it comes to gay issues, Carter is probably best known for saying just last month that Jesus would have been perfectly fine with marriage equality. (Carter came out in favor of marriage equality in 2012.) His comments attracted some attention, but Carter has been relegated to the category of elder statesman (a nice way of saying irrelevant) for so long, that what he thinks doesn’t stir up my controversy any more.

What may matter more is what Carter was able to accomplish when he was in office. Even his most ardent admirers would be hard put to place him in the top echelon of presidents. But when it comes to gay rights, Carter deserves a fair amount of credit. He was really the first president to take positive (and concrete) steps to acknowledge the importance of gay rights.

During his administration, the Foreign Service lifted its ban on gay and lesbian personnel and the Internal Revenue Service lifted its requirement that any LGBT nonprofit state that homosexuality was “a diseased pathology.”

His administration was also the first to invite gay activists to the White House, at the height of the Anita Bryant fear-mongering. The move was controversial and ultimately contributed to Midge Constanza, the official who issued the invitation, deciding to step down. But Carter didn’t quash the meeting either, which would have been the politically easy thing to do.

Like many another politician, including the current White House occupant, Carter went back and forth on gay issues. He  was on record supporting gay rights as early as 1976, but caved when it came to supporting a plank in the Democratic party platform. During his re=election campaign, he refused to commit to issuing an executive order prohibiting employment discrimination. The political reasons for his waffling were easy to understand (if not forgivable), given that the Democrats were still stinging from George McGovern’s defeat in 1972, which pundits widely attributed to the party’s leftward drift.

Still, for at least two reasons, Carter’s willingness to offer support to the cause was important. For one, the times were very different, and the modern LGBT movement was just beginning to emerge. The support of the president offered a legitimacy that was much needed to spur the movement’s advance.

The other reason is one that is easy to forget. Carter is an evangelical and has been very upfront about the importance of faith in his life. He proved that supporting gay rights didn’t fly in the face of all religious belief. Since Carter’s defeat in 1980, evangelicals have largely cast their lot with the Republican party and evangelical leaders have made gay-bashing their bread and butter. But it wasn’t always so.

Carter may not have been anyone’s idea of the perfect president. But it’s not hard to imagine that the country’s early response to the AIDS epidemic would have been very different if Carter had been re-elected. (It could hardly have been worse.)

As Carter enters the last stage of his life, only a low-life would spend time badmouthing him. (Needless to say, there are Republicans ready to duke it out for the title. ) It’s worth remembering the groundwork that Carter laid as president for the gains we’re finally seeing now. He was too timid at times, but he moved the argument for gay rights forward, and forty years later, still continues to do so.

For that he deserves our respect.

JohnGallagher

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WATCH: How This 12-Year-Old Lacrosse Player Found His Courage

ESPN’s SportsCenter discovers of how a trailblazing athlete helped a young player find his own strength, a decade after the former lacrosse player first came out.

read more

Sunnivie Brydum

www.advocate.com/sports/2015/08/30/watch-how-12-year-old-lacrosse-player-found-his-courage

Ellen DeGeneres tackles gender stereotypes with new GapKids clothing range

Ellen DeGeneres is expanding her clothing and lifestyle brand, ED, to support and encourage young girls, however they choose to express their identities.

Working in collaboration with Gap, the new GapKids x ED line is aimed at every girl, ‘whether they skateboard or dance, wear dresses or jeans, build forts or paint rainbows, or everything in between,’ the website explains.

Using a simple color palette of blues, reds and neutral tones, many of the items in the range feature slogans, ditching the more ‘traditional’ gendered statements in favour of inspirational lines including ‘Be your own hero’, ‘Dance’, ‘You better believe it’ , even quoting a line from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream on one of the tops: ‘And though she be but little, she is fierce.’

In promotional video, Ellen explained: ‘We focus so much on our differences and that is creating a lot of chaos and negativity and bullying in the world.

‘And I think that if we focus on what we all have in common which is ‘we all just want to be happy’ that would be a lot better.’

As well as graphic tees, leggings, dresses and hoodies, the range also includes accessories, including caps, tote bags, backpacks, lunch boxes and sew-on patches.

GapKids x ED is donating $250,000 from the sales of the range to Girls Inc, a non-profit organization set up to inspire girls to be confident and fulfil their potential.

 

Below are a few of the items now on sale:

The post Ellen DeGeneres tackles gender stereotypes with new GapKids clothing range appeared first on Gay Star News.

Mel Spencer

www.gaystarnews.com/article/ellen-degeneres-tackles-gender-stereotypes-with-new-gapkids-clothing-range/

Gay Iconography: Let’s Get Weird With Amy Sedaris

Even the most commonly recognized gay icons — Madonna, Gaga, Kylie — inspire spirited debate among the gay community, with folks just as passionately arguing a lack of relevance, talent or appeal. There are some exceptions, among them the quirky comedian, author and actress Amy Sedaris.

The younger sibling of out author David Sedaris has been captivating audiences with her off-kilter characters and campy craft projects since first winning hearts as bisexual former junkie sex-worker-turned-forty-something high school student Jerri Blank. That’s just the tip of the twisted iceberg for Sedaris’ warped ways. In addition to creating one of the most memorably (and lovably) strange characters in television history, she’s also turned in a series of scene-stealing performances on shows including Sex and the City, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Broad City.

Off screen, Sedaris has become something of an anti-Hints From Heloise, compiling advice and recipes for entertaining and crafting delivered with Sedaris’ signature oddball style. Perhaps it’s that send-up of 1950s-style domesticity that speaks to a certain gay audience’s appreciation of camp, or maybe it’s just the subversion of such tired traditional Americana. Or maybe it works so well because she’s so hilarious. No matter the cause, Sedaris enjoys a level of celebrity in certain pockets of the gay population that ensures whatever she does next will be popping up in a newsfeed near you.

Take a look back at some of her work in some of our favorite clips below.

Before she became Jerri Blank, Sedaris was part of the Second City comedy troupe in Chicago. In 1995, she worked with Paul Dinello and the new host of The Late Show on CBS, Stephen Colbert, on a Comedy Central sketch show, Exit 57. The show was canceled after one 12-episode season, but was something of a critical darling.

Sedaris, Dinello and Colbert worked together again launching Strangers With Candy in 1999. The series follows admitted “boozer, user, and loser” Jerri Blank as she goes back to high school as a forty-something woman. Inspired by Scared Straight-esque motivational speaker Florrie Fisher, the series also skewered the teen drama My So-Called Life. After running for three seasons from 1999-2000, a film prequel was released in 2007.

Sedaris’ takes on domesticity aren’t exactly what you’d expect to see in Better Homes & Garden. Her guide to entertaining I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence offers suggestions on how to repurpose pantyhose, customize guests’ cigarette lighters with shelfpaper and how to repurpose cheeseballs for later parties (which she discusses in the hilarious clip above with Martha Stewart). Don’t laugh it off; the book spent more than 12 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. She followed that up in 2010 with Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People, for those of us who can’t resist a good set of googly eyes or a mosaic of James Brown made from corn, rice and beans.

Even if alt-comedy is not your taste, you may have glimpsed Sedaris in Dolly Parton’s video for “Better Get To Livin’”. Sedaris described the experience to PrideSource: “When they asked me to do it, I was like, ‘Of course!’ And then when they told me I got to work with a monkey, I was like, ‘Dolly, who?!’ Yeah, my dream was to work with a little monkey and the vest that the monkey wore – [costume designer] Adam [Selman] had made him a little vest – we put that in the book. It’s next to the banana pudding. It’s cute.”

Sedaris has a way of shining in every scene she’s in. Whether she’s playing one of Carrie Bradshaw’s agents on Sex and City or a desperate divorcee in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Sedaris’ strange characters are always just human enough to feel authentic. She was particularly effective as a real estate rep on Comedy Central’s Broad City, darting around NYC in her Smart car wearing a neck brace.

What’s your favorite Sedaris scene?

The post Gay Iconography: Let’s Get Weird With Amy Sedaris appeared first on Towleroad.

Bobby Hankinson

Gay Iconography: Let’s Get Weird With Amy Sedaris