Margaret Cho on Kim Davis: ‘She’s so gross’

Margaret Cho has vowed to marry one same-sex couple at every stop of The psyCHO Tour which kicks off on 1 October.

So far, there are no tour stops in Kentucky where Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis has been fighting the issuance of marriage licenses to same-sex couples because of her religious beliefs.

‘She’s so gross,’ Cho says of Davis in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter posted on Friday (25 September).

‘I don’t understand — she acts like she’s some kind of freedom fighter, as if she deserves some sort of accolade for not upholding the Constitution and breaking the law.’

Davis served five days in a Kentucky jail earlier this month for defying a federal court order that she not interfere with the licenses being issued.

Upon her release, Davis was greeted by a rally organized by former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and attended by US Senator Ted Cruz.

‘It’s really insulting to the heroic people who have gone to prison for their beliefs,’ Cho said of the spectacle.

Among the stops on Cho’s comedy tour is San Francisco where she will play two shows on 15 October at The Castro Theatre.

She will be performing marriages in the city where she officiated her first ceremonies back in 2008. Back then, she performed marriages inside San Francisco City Hall which is where the late civil rights leader Harvey Milk was murdered 27 years ago.

Says Cho: ‘It’s a place where literally the most tragic event of gay politics happened, so to go back there and celebrate marriage equality there was such a triumph, and I wanted to bring a bit of that energy to these shows.’

The post Margaret Cho on Kim Davis: ‘She’s so gross’ appeared first on Gay Star News.

Greg Hernandez

www.gaystarnews.com/article/margaret-cho-on-kim-davis-shes-so-gross/

Kick Off Folsom With These Awkward S&M Family Photos

In his series Boy and his SIR: BDSM and the Queer Family, Kevin Warth photographs constructed realities in which BDSM practices coexist with domestic and familial rituals.

Warth writes:

“This body of work stems from my disidentification with moderate gay politics, which primarily concerns itself with the legalization of gay marriage and adoption. In response, I question if this normative family structure is a desirable goal for queer relations, or if other modes of kinship are more suitable.”

Oh, and happy Folsom!

Dan Tracer

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/EIjYjoxWNmU/kick-off-folsom-with-these-awkward-sm-family-photos-20150925

Watch LIVE: Hate Group Honors Kim Davis, Casey Davis, SweetCakes by Melissa

The Values Voter Summit, the annual meeting of conservatives sponsored by the hate group Family Research Council, kicked off today, and tonight its ‘Evening Plenary Session’ features an entire segment called ‘Free to Believe’  devoted to the Christian martyrs who have stood up for the right to discriminate against gay people including Casey County, Kentucky Clerk Casey Davis, the not-so-lovely couple from Oregon whose bakery was recently ordered to pay $135,000 to a lesbian they refused to bake a cake for in 2013, and everyone’s least favorite Kentucky Clerk  and new Republican Kim Davis, who will be receiving the ‘Cost of Discipleship Award’ from Oliver North.

There is a whole lot of hate to be taken in, so here’s the live feed if you’re hoping to use this Friday night to test your gag reflex in the worst way possible.

The session starts at 7:15 pm ET. Order of appearance here.

The post Watch LIVE: Hate Group Honors Kim Davis, Casey Davis, SweetCakes by Melissa appeared first on Towleroad.

Andy Towle

Watch LIVE: Hate Group Honors Kim Davis, Casey Davis, SweetCakes by Melissa

Gay Fans' Gift Delights Janet Jackson at Tampa Concert

Fans may have swooned at Janet Jackson’s concert Thursday in Tampa, but the singer herself was blown away by one gift tossed onstage, a T-shirt emblazoned with the names “Penny, Charlene, Cleo, Justice.”

Obscure, to be sure, but Jackson die-hards know those are names of characters the 49-year-old superstar has portrayed in roles on film and television.

The T-shirt was lovingly created by two gay men, visual artist and designer Chad Mize who lives in nearby St. Petersburg, and photographer Ryan Prado, who is originally from Tampa but now lives in New York City. The friends mimicked one of Mize’s popular logo designs to make a few special Jackson shirts for themselves, as well as one they’d try to hand deliver to the singer during her performance at Amalie Arena.

That honor went to Prado, seen above with partner Adam R. Deremer (left). Prado calls himself a Jackson superfan. He returned to Florida this week to catch two of the singer’s concerts. (All told, Prado has tickets to six shows on the Unbreakable tour. On past tours he’s seen as many as 12.)

On Thursday, Prado had front row center seats, which allowed him to toss the T-shirt right onstage.

“I didn’t know if she’d look at it because so many people throw things onstage,” Prado says. “But then she picked it up and turned it around to to read it. I could see it register on her face and she started smiling,” Prado said.

“I jumped up and down to show her I was wearing the same shirt.”

It was a moment Prado says he’ll never forget. “It was incredible. She’s just my absolute, all-time favorite. No one even comes close to touching her.”

Mize wasn’t at Thursday’s concert — he’s seeing Jackson next month in San Francisco — and says he’s still marveling over photos of Jackson beaming while holding the shirt.

“It’s an amazing feeling,” Mize says. “You grow up admiring someone and loving their music, and then to know you made them happy — it’s just surreal.”

The design has now been made available for order on Mize’s web site. To see more of Jackson’s reaction to the shirt, see Prado’s Instagram.

Gina Vivinetto

www.advocate.com/music/2015/9/25/gift-gay-fans-delights-janet-jackson-tampa-concert-0

19 Couples Halloween Costumes You Won't Roll Your Eyes At

Dressing up for Halloween as a couple doesn’t need to be an embarrassing ordeal.  

Instead, think of it as an opportunity to show the world just how cool you and your boo really are. Below are 18 costume ideas for couples who know how to have fun. 

Also on HuffPost:

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It’s official: Kim Davis is now a Republican

Earlier this month, Republican presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz were clamoring to be on stage next to Kim Davis after the Rowan County Clerk was released from a Kentucky jail.

It turns out they were jockeying to be seen with a longtime Democrat.

Davis, who was jailed for defying a judge’s order that she allow marriage licenses to same-sex couples, has now made the switch to a party where her social conservative views are a better fit.

‘My husband and I had talked about it for quite a while and we came to the conclusion that the Democratic Party left us a long time ago, so why were we hanging on?’ she told Reuters on Friday (25 September).

Davis is in Washington DC to address the anti-gay Family Research Council. The appearance comes during a week in which the has upped her media profile with interviews on ABC and Fox News.

Despite her change in party affiliation, Davis insisted it is ‘kind of far fetched’ that she would campaign for any Republican candidates.

The post It’s official: Kim Davis is now a Republican appeared first on Gay Star News.

Greg Hernandez

www.gaystarnews.com/article/its-official-kim-davis-is-now-a-republican/

Alabama Healthcare Facilities Learn about HRC’s Healthcare Equality Index

On September 17, healthcare administrators from across Alabama gathered with HRC Alabama staff and Tari Hanneman, the Deputy Director of HRC’s Health and Aging Program, for the state’s first Healthcare Equality Index Lunch & Learn.
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/alabama-healthcare-facilities-learn-about-hrcs-healthcare-equality-index?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

News: Tarantula, Caitlyn Jenner, Corn, Ellen Page, Alex Pettyfer

> Gay Catholic pioneer Father John McNeill is dead at the age of 90.

> House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) seen as frontrunner for Speaker.

> Sam Smith looking colorful on the cover of British GQ in a shot from Mariano Vivanco.

> Video: Dude with cornrows eats corn while listening to Korn.

> Judge approves Caitlyn Jenner’s name change.

> Second man pleads guilty to March 2012 torture of a gay African-American man in Corpus Christi: “Garza, who’s 33, and Serrata, who’s 22, admitted in court that they lured the man to an apartment, where for three hours they punched, kicked and assaulted him with various weapons, including a frying pan, a sock filled with batteries, a belt and a broomstick.”

> Joseph Gordon-Levitt sings “Bitch Better Have My Money” with the Ragtime gals, barbershop quartet-style.

> David Beckham is world class.

> Escaped tarantula grounds Delta flight from Baltimore to Atlanta.

> Reed Morano to direct Ellen Page in gay Marine drama Lioness: “Lioness tells the true story of Lance Corporal Leslie Martz (who will be portrayed by Page), a U.S. Marine who was stationed in Haditha, Iraq, and sent to Afghanistan as the leader of the first Female Engagement Team.  Determined to serve her country with the same valor and impact as the men she marches alongside, Martz soon finds herself fighting a war beyond the takedown of key insurgents and the Taliban.”

> Bully who hit blind classmate arrested. Teen hero speaks out.

> Transgender inmate Sandy Brown wins suit against Maryland prison officials: “Brown was serving a five-year sentence for assault when in 2014 she said she was placed in solitary confinement 24 hours a day for 66 days at Patuxent after a routine mental health screening, according to court records. She said guards watched her shower and encouraged her to commit suicide.”

> Hedi Slimane has Alex Pettyfer under his lens.

> Prince William and Prince Harry are here to satisfy your construction guy fetish.

> No gay nudity on Twitch, but blue alien boobs are fine.

> A Sinner in Mecca: New documentary chronicles gay filmmaker Parvez Sharma’s travels to the hajj. “Despite Mr. Sharma’s notoriety as a gay filmmaker — the new film includes footage of his 2011 New York wedding to an atheist musician identified only as Dan — he traveled to Saudi Arabia, where homosexuality is punishable by beatings, jail time and death.”

> Jake Gyllenhaal’s hair is looking lush these days.

> Margaret Cho on Kim Davis: “She’s so gross. I don’t understand — she acts like she’s some kind of freedom fighter, as if she deserves some sort of accolade for not upholding the Constitution and breaking the law,” Cho explained. “It’s really insulting to the heroic people who have gone to prison for their beliefs.”

The post News: Tarantula, Caitlyn Jenner, Corn, Ellen Page, Alex Pettyfer appeared first on Towleroad.

Andy Towle

News: Tarantula, Caitlyn Jenner, Corn, Ellen Page, Alex Pettyfer

Geared Up: Why I'm Going To Folsom 2015

Either you’re one of the 400,000 people going to the Folsom Street Fair this weekend, or you’re tired of hearing about it from all your friends who are going. Located in the historically kinky South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco, the Folsom Street Fair is marketed as the largest leather, fetish, and BDSM gathering in the world. Fully aware of the amount of money I will spend, the amount of hours I will sleep (not many), and the amount of other activities (ahem) I will engage in, I’m almost tired of it already. So this year I had to ask myself: Why go? 

Well, for fun, of course. But Folsom is more than just fun. For a millennial-aged gay guy like me, Folsom is also an educational event, a treasure trove of information where I can learn new kinks and discover better, safer ways to do the kinks I already enjoy. For beginner fetishists and longtime pros alike, Folsom is a vital exchange of information as well as a celebration of a counterculture with a long history behind it — a history that I will continue.  

I was born in 1992. Given my sexual history and personal perversions, I’m lucky that I wasn’t born in 1972 or even 1982. I missed the darkest period in queer history, and one that defined us forever.

Straight people don’t have a collective loss like the AIDS epidemic to band together over, so I’m not sure if they can understand its enormous impact. I’m not even sure gay men my age can truly fathom what the AIDS epidemic was at its height— because I’m not sure I can.

A marginalized and punished community lost an entire generation just as it was starting to gain traction in politics and visibility in culture. LGBT progress was virtually halted as ministers and conservative politicians across the country seized upon the epidemic as a wrathful God’s final say on “the gay problem.” In a way, we invented the “YOLO” attitude — a concept that has lingered with gay men ever since — because the idea that tomorrow could be the start of a slow and horrible death became very real for us. In 1992, the year I was born, I imagine many men woke up wondering how they made it, how the senseless workings of chance put their names on one list and the names of their friends and former lovers on another. 

For this reason, I revere the history of LGBT culture and believe it is my duty as a new-era gay to know it. My generation has already made its contributions: It reclaimed words like “queer” as power terms (much to the chagrin of generations previous who remember it as a slur). My generation brought dating apps to gay life. And my generation will grow old in a country far different from the one our predecessors knew.

In the early days of the epidemic, leathermen and kinksters were some of the first to band together to fight AIDS, and theirs is a largely untold story. So taking my place not only in the next generation of gay men but also the next generation of leather-lovers and kink players is no small thing: With it comes the weight of a powerful history and a place of belonging within a tight-knit community that has been fighting to free sex from its cultural bonds, destigmatize HIV, and advocate for alternative lifestyles long before I was born.

When I first discovered I liked getting tied up and enjoyed the feeling of leather on my skin, I had no idea that my tastes would be a doorway into a community of the kindest men and women I’ve ever known — and some of the most dynamic political activists in the history of this country.

Folsom, in many ways, is our home base, our headquarters. San Francisco has been a kinkster’s city for a long time, but it is never so uproariously leather-studded as when this weekend rolls around. People come from small towns all over the world where their kinks have been restricted to private bedroom play, and it is here, at last, that they are allowed to express themselves openly.

I’m going because, after all the fun and sex and partying, Folsom is a chance to be with my people. If leathermen, daddies, pigs, pups, rubber fetishists, piss players, fisters, fistees, slaves, masters, sadists, masochists, bondage boys, and motorcycle men are your family — as they are mine — the Folsom Street Fair feels like home.

ALEXANDER CHEVES is a sex-positive writer, blogger, and intern with The Advocate. Follow him on Twitter @BadAlexCheves. 

Alexander Cheves

www.advocate.com/love-and-sex/2015/9/25/geared-why-im-going-folsom-2015

Faith Communities Have a Special Role to Play in Meeting Needs of Bisexual People
If you Google the question, “Were David and Jonathan in the Bible gay?” you will get hundreds of hits. Some sites, drawing on the scholarship of, among others, John Boswell, an historian of Medieval gay culture who focused in particular on Christianity and homosexuality, assert that the biblical story of King Saul’s son Jonathan, who meets David after he has slayed Goliath, is one of homosexual love. Others deride the idea altogether. Few, if any, point out a third possibility: In today’s terms, Jonathan and David are men who might best be described as having a bisexual orientation.

Passages from 1 Samuel describe their devotion to one another:

• “Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul.” (18:3)
• “The souls of Jonathan and David became intertwined, and Jonathan loved David with all his heart.” (18:10)
• “Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him; for he loved him as he loved his own life.” (20:17)
• Another — 2 Samuel 1:26 — records David’s anguish at Jonathan’s death: “I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; greatly beloved were you to me; your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

Those who know their Bible stories will remember that David had many wives. The story of Bathsheba, who became David’s seventh wife, leaves no doubt that David was attracted to women: “It happened, late one afternoon, when David rose from his couch and was walking about on the roof of the king’s house, that he saw from the roof a woman bathing; the woman was very beautiful. David … sent messengers to fetch her, and she came to him, and he lay with her.” (2 Samuel 11:2-4)

This erasure of the bisexual nature of David’s affections is worth contemplating as we mark Bisexual Awareness Day today. Many mainstream denominations and congregations have made significant progress in welcoming and affirming lesbian and gay people. These faith communities have welcomed LGBT people into their congregations and leadership and incorporated the fight for LGBT equality into their social justice work. Some congregations have even begun to respond to the needs and concerns of transgender people. But the “B” in the LGBT acronym is still largely ignored.

This invisibility of bisexuals in many faith communities mirrors their invisibility in society at large. A recent study shows that nearly one-third of Americans under age 30 consider themselves bisexual. In spite of this, and despite the lived experience of many people, there is a widespread belief that bisexuality is not a real orientation. Consider the dustup in July between actress/model Cara Delevingne and Vogue after the magazine ran a story suggesting that Delevingne’s bisexuality was a phase: It is evidence of the dismissive – and, ultimately, harmful — attitudes many take toward bisexuality. In fact, research shows that bisexuality is a distinct orientation. A 2013 Pew Research Center Survey found that 40 percent of those who fall under the LGBT umbrella in the U.S. experience romantic and sexual desires and attractions toward people of different sexes and genders.

The failure of society at large to recognize bisexuals — much less embrace and welcome them — exacts a painful toll: That same Pew survey of LGBT people in the U.S. found that just 22 percent of bisexual people said their sexual orientation was a positive factor in their lives, compared with 46 percent of gay men and 38 percent of lesbians. The Pew survey also found that bisexuals are more likely to be closeted than their gay and lesbian peers: just 28 percent of bisexual respondents said they were out to the most important people in their lives, compared with 71 percent of lesbians and 77 percent of gay men. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that research also shows that bisexual people have higher rates of hypertension, poorer physical health and higher rates of smoking and use of alcohol than lesbians, gay men and heterosexuals.

As sanctuaries, spiritual homes and beacons of social justice, faith communities have a particularly important role to play in providing for the spiritual and social needs of bisexual people. We can do this by creating “bisexually healthy congregations” — those where clergy are educated about bisexuality and provide bi-inclusive pastoral care and preaching, and where bisexuality is explicitly addressed in the church’s youth and adult sexuality education.

When a congregation welcomes and recognizes people of all sexual orientations and gender identities, it contributes to a positive image of religion among people who may have rejected religion as intolerant or irrelevant. Such congregations become safe spaces for youth who are exploring their sexuality and have questions. Embracing bisexual people also makes it possible for bisexuals to be open about their identity and helps create a more welcoming atmosphere, encouraging authenticity and community among all members.

Whether we are people of faith or not, we all have an obligation to create a world that embraces diversity. Our religious and civic traditions, as well as our common humanity, call us to love our neighbor, to welcome the stranger and to advocate on behalf of those whose voices often go unheard.

— 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.

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