Escorts Unite in Defense of Rentboy

Six male escorts known in the industry as Silas X, the Legendary Dave, Master Avery, Danny Cruz, Steven Kessler, and Simply Adam have united in support of Rentboy.com, the all-male escorting site that was shut down last month after the Department of Homeland Security raided its Manhattan offices. Seven employees were arrested under charges of promoting illegal prostitution. 

The site billed itself as “the world’s destination to meet the perfect male escort or masseur,” and boasted a database of more than 10,500 men in 2,100 cities worldwide.

Many LGBT organizations have come out in support of Rentboy, including Lambda Legal and the Transgender Law Center, saying that the site was a safe option for sex workers. Now the supporters also include the six escorts, who are urging erotic service providers, clients, and others involved in the adult industry to support the arrested employees by donating to an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign. 

“The money raised from this fund will be equally split amongst the seven Rentboy.com staff charged, and will be used at each individual’s discretion,” says the campaign page. “This includes use for primary legal funds, rent, food and other resources.”

The company’s CEO, Jeffrey Hurant, is among the seven people arrested. One of the escorts promoting the campaign, Danny Cruz, organized a protest in West Hollywood last Saturday at which he relayed to The Advocate something Hurant once told him: “These guys you work around in the escort industry, they’re not your competition, they’re your colleagues. You should know that, you should reach out to them, you should keep each other safe.” 

 

 

Alexander Cheves

www.advocate.com/love-and-sex/2015/9/10/escorts-unite-defense-rentboy

We Now Have Bigger Things to Fight Than Kim Davis
In the heat of our nationwide marriage equality victory, can LGBT and allied Americans resist a hate group’s bait?

The movement to preserve discrimination against gay and lesbian couples in the matter of legal marriage has met its irreversible failure. As the new nationwide reality of marriage equality unfolds, Liberty Counsel — a Southern Poverty Law Center-certified hate group connected to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University — has found a figure to serve as Ultimate Victim and also as bait for the LGBT-and-allied community.

Kentucky’s Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis defied the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Judge David L. Bunning by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. As a government employee, she violated her oath to serve all the public, and for those repeated violations, she predictably spent five days in jail. Were she truly unable to perform her duties because her of religious beliefs, resigning would have been the principled response.

Davis emerged from Liberty Counsel’s likely nationwide search for someone to label a “prisoner of conscience.”

I can guess some of their search criteria — can you?

1. Female. A more sympathetic Victim, especially before a male judge. Also less like to assert herself with Liberty lawyers or to see herself as being used.

2. Rural. Smaller than Caribou, Maine, Davis’s home town of Morehead, Kentucky sits in the Daniel Boone National Forest in eastern Kentucky’s Appalachian Mountains. Its historical highlight was reportedly an 1880’s “war” that was a classic family feud.

3. Educational status as a power differential with her attorneys. Where are the references to Kim Davis’s education?

4. Fundamentalist Christian, the stricter the sect, the better. Plain appearance, well-covered.

5. Troubled marriage history (that’ll drive opponents wild) and recent born-again status (four years — nothing like a recent convert).

6. Plenty of shame in background. This makes her more eager for redemption and therefore firmer in defying the law and serving as Liberty’s tool. Also invites opponents to be mean as hell and to have a field day with her — all at Liberty Counsel’s behest.

7. Inexperienced on the national stage. Kim Davis’s mother held this county clerk job for 37 years, and the daughter assisted for 27 years before getting elected herself. Then the daughter hired her own son to work in the office to set up the third generation. Nepotism is completely legal where Ms. Davis lives. Does this say something about how insular and ingrown her world is?

8. Nearly impossible to fire. Liberty Counsel wants the longest possible run for this Victim. The longer the media firestorm, the more lucrative their fundraising bonanza. The meaner the attacks from LGBT and allied people, the more Liberty can crow about how evil LGBT and allied people are. Every nasty meme means more sympathetic donations for Liberty.

Because Davis is an elected official accountable to voters, she can’t be fired from her job. The Kentucky Legislative Research Commission says Davis would have to be removed by the legislature. The Kentucky Constitution requires impeachment by the state’s House of Representatives and trial by the state’s Senate. The legislature is not in session until next year, and this process would take months even if there WERE the political will to remove her, which there is not.

So she won’t disappear — perfectly serving Liberty’s long-term purpose.

I am not interested in demonizing such a person as Kim Davis, but even if I were, I would not want to play into Liberty Counsel’s hateful, manipulative hands.

Simply in humanitarian terms, consider the rest of this woman’s life after such extended public pillorying. Her life as she knew it is likely over. Her safety — and that of her loved ones — will always be a worry. From total obscurity in her sleepy little mountain town, she has become a household name on a polarizing topic, her face everywhere on the Internet.

Liberty Counsel will keep her visible as a target just as long as they possibly can. Do we think she has any idea what Monica-Lewinsky-scale Internet harassment is really like?

LGBT and allied people have a clue about the long-term psychological effects of such harassment. How will her psyche hold together? How will this affect the people she loves most?

Kim Davis is a perfect pick by Liberty Counsel for their own gain. Doubtless her ultimate fate is little concern of theirs. Despite the harm she has knowingly done to a few gay and lesbian couples, there is no way that her endless public punishment will be commensurate to that harm.

Meanwhile, Liberty Counsel lawyers are men of wealth and privilege. Lead attorney Mathew D. Staver lives in a 1.2 million-dollar Florida home, and others likely in affluent gated communities from which they can beat an easy retreat to their comfy second homes, pools and boats. They face no such risks as Kim Davis does.

We LGBT and allied Americans have won the struggle for marriage equality in law. Our hard-fought victory raises questions about who we have become through the pain of our struggle, who we will be now as more equal Americans, and what we will contribute to a more perfect Union.

In the matter of Kim Davis, we now have the law on our side. We also face critical unfinished work to achieve a comprehensive federal law protecting us from discrimination in employment, housing, credit, public education, public accommodations, jury service, and access to federal programs. Why allow our attention to be distracted?

Let’s leave Ms. Davis in the law’s hands and not demean our own souls by taking Liberty’s bait. Let’s just Leave. Her. Alone.

Instead, let’s choose to live inside the joy of what we have won through our sacrifice, love and relentless courage. Let’s be proud of what we have contributed to the growing realization of our country’s ideals. Let’s rejoice in the new world we have made for and with our LGBT young, whose personal stories now hold so much more hope and promise.

That is the real victory, and there’s no going back.

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James Franco on being the target of gay jokes

It was two years ago that James Franco agreed to face a comedic firing squad on a Comedy Central Roast.

He went in expecting it to be a tough room but he did not expect to leave feeling gay bashed.

Among the jokes:

‘I don’t think James Franco is necessarily gay or straight. I think he literally can’t open his eyes enough to see who he’s fucking,’ said Sarah Silverman.

Host Seth Rogen asked: ‘Who is the real James Franco? Is he an artist? Is he an actor? Is he a scholar? He’s tough to pin down; although I’ve heard many guys have been able to do it.’

In an interview with The Independent, Franco calls out as homophobic some of the jokes that night as well as some of the comedy in the films in which he’s appeared.

‘I was a little shocked, I didn’t write those jokes [at the roast], they did. I didn’t make any gay jokes. There is still a little bit of homophobia. I think part of it, when I do films with Seth, it’s more playing on straight male anxiety about any sort of same-sex interaction.

‘To me that is really a comment on a larger anxiety and not really anything about denigrating or criticizing anything about the gay community.’

Franco has not let jokes discourage him from tackling gay-themed projects.

He produced and starred in I Am Michael this year opposite Zachary Quinto. Franco played the lead role of gay activist Michael Glatze who went from editing a gay lifestyle magazine to denouncing homosexuality.

He has also played gay roles in Howl, Milk and The Broken Tower and directed Interior. Leather Bar. which reimagined 40 minutes of bondage footage cut from the film Cruising more than 30 years earlier.

The post James Franco on being the target of gay jokes appeared first on Gay Star News.

Greg Hernandez

www.gaystarnews.com/article/james-franco-on-being-the-target-of-gay-jokes/

Sifting Through the Stonewall Morass

As we put this issue to bed, the trailer for Stonewall was released, and comments and headlines flew around the Web accusing director Roland Emmerich of whitewashing and trans erasure. None of the detractors, at this stage, had seen the film. The film might be great and all-inclusive and true. Or it might not. But at that moment, all of us who decried the content of the film were literally, by definition, prejudiced. We were raving on about a one-minute-long marketing tool, and a marketing tool bedeviling to filmmakers who don’t make them.

Soon enough we’ll know more about what’s actually in the film. In the meantime, the uproar is instructive. Here we have the confluence of two conditions that primed us for protest: the legendary importance of the riots, and the mechanisms of hair-trigger social-media-fueled outrage.

It was especially bad timing that the Stonewall trailer came out the very day that USC’s Annenberg School put out a study that delineated the overwhelming predominance of white, straight men in film roles. With hashtags, pitchforks, and boycott petitions at the ready, we leapt in. We’re all now primed to lash out at injustice, inspired at least in part by the very anger that led to the Stonewall riots. Such anger can be very useful if properly deployed, but as I write this, none of us can say with certainty if the “how dare you, Roland Emmerich?” comments are a warranted or good or useful deployment of anger.

In David Carter’s book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (just one of many accounts, some conflicting), he describes the atmosphere that night. The patrons of the bar had been put through a series of recent raids, and they were at a breaking point when the police raided just after 1 a.m. on Saturday, June 28, 1969.

Drag queens had been subject to humiliation in repeated raids, ushered over to policewomen for “examination” until they were forced to acknowledge, “All right, honey, I’m a man.” That night, they were not complying with orders to congregate in the bathroom. One drag queen hit a cop with her purse when being led outside, and she was beaten with a baton. A tall, butch lesbian resisted police and fought with cops for several minutes; as she was forced into a police car, she cried out for help from the already-evicted gay men gathered outside. Her pleas were the flashpoint for rioting.

Actual photos of the nights of rioting are scarce. (One of the few images shows homeless “street kids” who slept in Christopher Park nearby, and who found a refuge at the Stonewall Inn, being pushed back by police.) And testimonials vary: Who, among the queer people living in New York then, wouldn’t want to claim they’d been there that very night?

But so many of us were represented there those nights: gay men, lesbians, gender non-conforming people, black, Latino, white, the well-heeled, the homeless. We can all be proud of the Stonewall riots. And in the 47 swirling, heady years since then, Stonewall has become the mythic, Arthurian stone from which each of our communities is pulling a sword — proof of our claim to a heritage that includes that transformative night. But there is room for all of us to claim it.

No single movie nor any one book can completely tell the story of the riots. But by preemptively decrying a movie without a firm basis for doing so, do we risk an outcome in which fewer — not more — movies about LGBT history are made? I know that’s not the primary issue here. We will speak our truths, and the consequences will flow.

But if Stonewall sucks, let’s make another, and another. Whose permission do we need?

Matthew Breen

www.advocate.com/current-issue/2015/9/10/sifting-through-stonewall-morass

R&B Singer Tamia: I Compare All My New Music to 'Stranger in My House'
“I still get goosebumps when I go to a drag show and they’re performing ‘Stranger in My House,'” admits singer Tamia with a laugh.

The star must get chills often then! Nearly 20 years after its release, the chart-topping Thunderpuss remix of “Stranger” is now classic in LGBT clubs…bordering on cliché among drag performers. And the song remains Tamia’s single greatest Billboard chart success to date. Its multi-genre appeal speaks to her approach to music, she says.

“I make music for everyone,” confirmed Tamia during a recent telephone interview, “If you show me love, I show you love back!”

In 2001, the Canadian solidified herself as a recording artist with mass appeal. The smoldering album version of “Stranger” became Tamia’s sole Top 10 mainstream hit — and third such staple at R&B stations. Those remixes, inescapable in gay clubs, topped global dance charts. Even now, Tamia says, fans of all varieties go crazy for the song.

And, she acknowledged, in some ways that continues to guide her career — even influencing the writing on her latest album, Love Life.

Watch “Stuck with Me” from Tamia’s New Love Life Album


“Hopefully, my career is long, and ‘A Stranger in My House’ was a long time ago, but I love performing that song,” she stated. “I can’t wait to get to it in a show. So that’s what I compare [any new material] to.

“I always ask myself, ‘Is this something I want to sing for the rest of my life?'” Tamia confessed, “Or if somebody said, ‘She sings that song!’ am I going to be proud?'”

The formula seems to have worked. After two independent album releases, her major label return Love Life arrived in early June on Plus One, a subsidiary of Def Jam Records. Led by singles “Sandwich and a Soda” and “Stuck with Me,” it opened at No. 2 on the R&B Album tally, Tamia’s highest-charting record to date.

“I didn’t know if I wanted to go with a major label, but when I met with them, they said, ‘We want you to continue everything you’ve been doing, we just want to help you with it,'” she shared.

Apparently Def Jam took note of Tamia’s self-made success! After More in 2004, No. 17 on Billboard‘s “Hot 200” and a Top 5 R&B Album, she left long-time label Elektra. Independently-released Between Friends (2006) and Beautiful Surprise (2012) both broke the R&B Top 10.

Relive Tamia’s Iconic “Stranger in My House” Remix!

Given her track record alone, Tamia was hesitant to re-sign with a major label. However, noting the added reach such an agreement offers, not to mention the financial support, she was open to discussions. Her new label home, she said, proved to be a…well, “beautiful surprise.”

“They didn’t say, ‘If you can just work with this producer’ or ‘If you can just be a little younger or a little thinner’ or a little whatever,” noted Tamia, who has experienced exactly that in the past with other labels. “They just wanted to be there to help me along. They were like, ‘What goals do you have? How do you see this project?'”

With the album now a proven success, a tour in support of the new work is in full swing. Throughout Sept., Tamia has performances scheduled in Houston, New Orleans, Dallas, along the West Coast and across the Southwest. She lands at San Francisco’s Regency Ballroom on Tues., Sept. 22.

“I feel very fortunate that, after 20 years in the music business and six albums later, I’m able to still do what I love and make music that continues to inspire me,” she said in closing, “And, hopefully, will be appreciated by everyone.”

For Additional Information About Tamia’s Love Life Tour, Click Here.

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Charlie Hunnam cites Queer As Folk as proof he wasn’t afraid of Fifty Shades sex scenes

Actor Charlie Hunnam is opening up about his decision to drop out as the male lead of the film Fifty Shades of Grey.

“Oh, it was the worst professional experience of my life,’ Hunnam tells V Man. ‘It was the most emotionally destructive and difficult thing that I’ve ever had to deal with professionally. It was heartbreaking.’

Hunnam was replaced in the role of Christian Grey by Jamie Dornan because of a demanding work schedule that included shooting the final season of his FX series Sons of Anarchy then make the film Crimson Peak directed by Guillermo Del Toro.

The actor wants to make clear the decision was all about scheduling and not the explicit sex scenes in the film.

‘The outside perception of that was that I got really cold feet and got scared of the explicit nature of the sexuality of the piece,’ he says.

For anyone who thinks that, Hunnam points to his very explicit sex scenes as gay teen Nathan Maloney on the original Queer as Folk series in 1999-2000.

‘When I was 18 I was getting f—– in the ass, completely naked on national TV, you know?’

The post Charlie Hunnam cites Queer As Folk as proof he wasn’t afraid of Fifty Shades sex scenes appeared first on Gay Star News.

Greg Hernandez

www.gaystarnews.com/article/charlie-hunnam-cites-queer-as-folk-as-proof-he-wasnt-afraid-of-fifty-shades-sex-scenes/

Mexican Man With 19-Inch Penis Sued U.S. Prison Guards For Penis-Related Mistreatment

There is nothing fun about having a 19-inch penis.

We wouldn’t know from experience, but beyond the eye-popping phrase and lifelong conversation starter, Roberto Esquivel Cabrera has had a hell of a time with his third leg.

Here’s a bizarre video from TMZ in which he weighs the oversized member. The clip climaxes with Cabrera slapping himself in the face with his phallus while country music plays in the background:

And to make matters worse (as if they could get any worse), Cabrera has filed a law suit against guards at a Mississippi prison where he served time after illegally entering the country.

He said some prison guards made a spectacle of his abnormal penis and in handwritten documents, Cabrera alleges the guards demanded to take pictures of his penis, which they called “anaconda.” He also claims a female guard watched him as he changed his clothes and that gay prison guards would grab his penis while searching him.

TMZ rightly notes, “he did not explain why he says they’re gay.”

His lawsuit was dismissed when he was sent back to Mexico in 2011, but the legend lives on.

Dan Tracer

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/AimESNTr1i0/mexican-man-with-19-inch-penis-sued-u-s-prison-guards-for-penis-related-mistreatment-20150910

AsapScience Gets Handsy with a Lesson on Why Self Love is Good for You: VIDEO

AsapScience goes to town on the topic of masturbation and discusses why it’s good for you, both physically and mentally, to touch yourself. Myths such as developing hairy palms go out the window as masturbation is not only good for you, but prevents future erectile dysfunction in males, strengthens sperm and essentially cleans out prostates, thereby reducing chances of developing prostate cancer.

The guys also tackle womens’ masturbatory health and find they carry as many benefits as male masturbation.

Watch as AsapScience gets handsy with masturbation, urging viewers to wank away to their heart’s content, below:

The post AsapScience Gets Handsy with a Lesson on Why Self Love is Good for You: VIDEO appeared first on Towleroad.

Anthony Costello

AsapScience Gets Handsy with a Lesson on Why Self Love is Good for You: VIDEO

Anti-Government Group Threatens To Step In To Keep Kim Davis Out Of Jail

Kentucky clerk Kim Davis will return to work next week after having been jailed for contempt of court, and one anti-government group wants to make sure she never winds up behind bars again.  

The Oath Keepers, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization, as a “fiercely anti-government, militaristic group,” say they have their sights set on defending the Rowan County clerk, who has refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

In a phone call with Jackson County Kentucky Sheriff Denny Peyman, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes said members of his group had reached out to Davis’s legal team and were already forming an on-the-ground presence in Kentucky’s Rowan County, but remained tight-lipped on specifics, Right Wing Watch reports. Rhodes said his group’s action had nothing to do with same-sex marriage, but instead was focused on his belief that Davis had been illegally detained after being found in contempt of court by not issuing marriage licenses. 

“As far as we’re concerned, this is not over,” he said in the audio clip above. “This judge needs to be put on notice that his behavior is not going to be accepted, and we’ll be there to stop it and intercede ourselves if we have to.” 

Rhodes went on to compare Davis’s plight to that of the Founding Fathers, in that it deals “with the magistrates and the officers of the crown who wanted to run roughshod over the rights of the colonists without a jury indictment, without any of that.”

Arguing that the U.S. has an “unconstitutional imperial presidency” in place, Rhodes said in a statement on the Oath Keepers website, “We have had boots on the ground there since last week and will continue to have a presence …  [Federal District Court Judge David Bunning] has assumed unto himself not just the powers of all three branches of government, but has also taken on the powers of judge, jury, and ‘executioner.'”

Earlier this year, the Oath Keepers sparked controversy after sending four armed men to Ferguson, Missouri to reportedly protect conservative writers from the website, Infowars.com. 

Meanwhile, Davis’s attorney, Mathew Staver, has compared his client’s situation to that of Jews living in Nazi Germany.

“What happened in Nazi Germany, what happened there first, they removed the Jews from government public employment,” he said in a radio interview. “Then they stopped patronizing them in their private businesses, then they continued to stigmatize them, then they were the ‘problems,’ then they killed them.”

Also on HuffPost: 

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American Horror Story: Hotel trailer features queer cast beyond Matt Bomer and Lady Gaga

FX unveiled its first sneak peak of American Horror Story: Hotel on Thursday (10 September).

The trailer doesn’t reveal much in terms of plot but does provide the first glimpses of the show’s entire all-star cast which is led by Lady Gaga and Matt Bomer.

The bisexual Gaga and the openly gay Bomer head a cast that also includes bisexual actress Sarah Paulson – a AHS franchise veteran – and out actors Denis O’Hare and Cheyenne Jackson.

Also in the cast: Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, Wes Bentley, Chloë Sevigny, Lily Rabe, Max Greenfield, Mare Winningham, Evan Peters, Darren Criss and Finn Wittrock.

AHS: Hotel premieres on FX on 7 October. It is the fifth season of the anthology series co-created, executive produced, written and directed by openly gay Ryan Murphy of Glee fame.

The post American Horror Story: Hotel trailer features queer cast beyond Matt Bomer and Lady Gaga appeared first on Gay Star News.

Greg Hernandez

www.gaystarnews.com/article/american-horror-story-hotel-trailer-features-queer-cast-beyond-matt-bomer-and-lady-gaga/