WATCH: How to Live Your Musical, Find Your Inner Diva

Morgan Reynolds takes Manhattan with a mashup of empowering Broadway anthems.

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Brandon Voss

www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/theater/2014/10/08/watch-how-live-your-musical-find-your-inner-diva

Mitch McConnell Gets 'Needlessly Angry' After Surprising Radio Host With Interview
WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made a surprise appearance Wednesday on “Kentucky Sports Radio,” one of the state’s most popular radio shows. But in his efforts to paint himself as a fan of University of Kentucky basketball, McConnell came off sounding defensive. Listeners later described the appearance as “combative,” and host Matt Jones chided McConnell for getting “needlessly angry.”

McConnell — who appeared on the show three weeks after a similar appearance by Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes, McConnell’s opponent in next month’s election — used the opportunity to immediately tout his support for the Kentucky Wildcats. In addition to discussing funding he had secured for the University of Kentucky, McConnell noted that he’d been the author of a resolution in the Senate that congratulated the men’s basketball team on its 2012 championship.

“I’m a big fan of UK,” McConnell told Jones. “I’m not a big fan of Obama, and I know you are.”

Jones said he was only given 10 minutes’ notice for the interview by the McConnell campaign, and thus was not as prepared as he would have liked. But he posed questions to McConnell on a number of national issues, such as the federal minimum wage, Obamacare, climate change and gay marriage.

McConnell largely stuck to Republican talking points. He said he opposed a minimum wage increase because it would cost jobs, and said he believed the health care law should be repealed. He criticized the Environmental Protection Agency over its plans to cut carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants.

But at several points during the interview, McConnell grew agitated by Jones’ aggressive questioning. When McConnell said he would like to pull Obamacare out “root and branch,” Jones began to point out that full repeal would take away coverage from 500,000 Kentuckians who had enrolled in health care through the state-run exchange Kynect.

“Can I finish my answer?” said McConnell, who then went on to discuss the health care law’s cuts to Medicare. He did not address the Kentuckians who have signed up for coverage under Obamacare, an issue that has dogged McConnell during his re-election campaign.

At another point, Jones asked if McConnell believed in global warming, and the Kentucky Republican once again turned defensive when Jones pressed him for a definitive answer.

“What I have said repeatedly is I’m not a scientist, but what I can tell you even if you thought that was important … the United States doing this by itself is going to have zero impact,” McConnell said. (He gave a similar answer to the editorial board of The Cincinnati Enquirer last week.)

Jones said it was a simple “yes or no” answer.

“No it isn’t — it is not a yes or no question,” McConnell shot back. “I am not a scientist. I know there are scientists who think it’s a problem, there are scientists who think it isn’t a problem … My job is to try to protect jobs in Kentucky now, not speculate about science in the future.”

Listen to excerpts from the interview above, and scroll down to hear the full interview.

The discussion then turned to gay marriage. McConnell told Jones, “I believe that marriage should be between one man and one woman.”

Jones pointed out that same-sex marriage is now legal in some form across 30 states, and asked McConnell if those states were incorrect and why.

“I can tell you my opinion is that marriage should be between one man and one woman,” McConnell said again. “The courts are dealing with this issue and you’re citing things that are a result of court decisions. I’m giving you my opinion. My opinion is that marriage is between one man and one woman.”

Jones once again asked McConnell to elaborate on the reasons for his position, asking if it was based in Biblical beliefs. McConnell would only repeat, for the fourth time, that he believed marriage is between a man and a woman.

Before he left, McConnell declined an invitation from Jones to formally debate Grimes on the program. Jones said Grimes had agreed to the debate when she appeared on the show last month, but McConnell only said he had enjoyed talking with Jones and encouraged listeners to tune into a separate televised debate with Grimes next week.

After the segment with McConnell, Jones and his team said they found the interview to be bizarre. “That struck me as needlessly angry,” Jones said.

A producer chimed in that McConnell “came across as a little bit of a jerk,” while co-host Ryan Lemond said, “I don’t think he helped himself.”

The Huffington Post has reached out to McConnell’s campaign for comment, and will update this post if we receive a response.

The Kentucky Senate race is one of the most closely watched contests in this year’s midterm elections. HuffPost’s Pollster average, which combines all publicly available polling, shows McConnell currently leading Grimes by 4 percentage points.

Listen to the full interview below.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/08/mitch-mcconnell-kentucky-sports-radio_n_5953262.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Over 3 Years After Repeal of DADT, Transgender Service Members Are Still Barred From Serving Openly

Imagine if you were forced to lie about who you are in order to be able to keep your job. Then imagine if your husband or wife had to do the same for you.
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/three-years-after-repeal-of-dadt-transgender-service-members-are-still-barr?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

How The Publisher Of Advocate & Out Use Porn Sites To Inflate Traffic And Deceive Advertisers

You know those annoying “pop-under” advertisements that appear behind your favorite porn sites that distract you from the matter at hand?

Viewers may be surprised to see the home pages of Out.com and Advocate.com appear as pop-unders (see browser tabs on screen shot, right), behind such X-rated fare on PornHub.com as Hospital Gangbang and Mature Blake Tops Silver Daddy. Among the other pop-unders in this inspiring category is LiveJasmin.com, featuring nude shows of female strippers.

Why are the two venerable gay media brands showing up alongside such X-rated offerings? Here Media, which owns and operate the sites, is apparently artificially inflating the popularity of their digital properties and serving up false ad impressions to their sponsors.

In a nutshell, pop-unders allow the company to tally unique home page views every time one surfaces, even though viewers, otherwise occupied, almost never actually click away from the site they are checking out, and onto the news sites. The  benefit to Here? The price is significantly less than the cost of paid marketing on, say, Facebook or Twitter, where you must do the hard work of engaging readers and poney up dough to acquire traffic. Here then pockets the difference between what advertisers pay for high-value impressions and what the company pays for pop-unders. (Full disclosure: GayCities, Inc., the parent company of Queerty, competes with Here Media for some advertisers. GayCities has a policy prohibiting the use of pop-unders and other artificial traffic boosters.)

The pop-under strategy is generally considered cheating, deceiving advertisers about the actual size of the audience while bringing disrepute to online publishing. An entire industry, from browsers with pop-up blockers to rating services, has grown up alongside the Internet to keep publishers honest. Web rating companies like Comscore and Quantcast attempt to filter non-human requested traffic, with varying degrees of success, but Google Analytics, which also compiles web traffic, does not. Andrew Lipsman VP, Marketing & Insights at Comscore, Inc., told Queerty his company is devoted to determining “whether traffic being generated is actually coming from humans who are engaging in user-requested activity. If we determine the traffic isn’t human and isn’t user-requested, we don’t count it.”

Lipsman noted that even if pop-under traffic gets filtered by Comscore and other services, ad impressions are not generally monitored except by some advertisers themselves. He termed the practice of pumping up ad impressions “nefarious… Bad actors will try to inflate impression counts. We stay ahead of the the threats. But we don’t do that when it comes to ads. That’s not something we filter.”

It’s hard to imagine Here’s advertisers approved the practice in advance. For instance, look at the screen shot (above) we grabbed in September from the”pop-under” at the top of the home page. The Out.com home page that goes with that pop-under (see “Popunder” in the out.com URL) included a banner advertisement for American Express Platinum Card.

All major marketers steer clear of risque content, especially porn, gay or not. Given the history of  The Advocate and Out, the company’s marketing strategy seems particularly risky. Long before it was purchased by Here Media, the magazines struggled to attract mainstream advertisers due to its association with adult content, eventually shedding adult magazines like Men and Freshmen that it published alongside news and entertainment publications.

Now the company has come full circle, embracing online porn as a sham traffic driver. “I’m stunned,” says Henry Scott, the president of Out from 1996 to 2000 and today the publisher of the well-regarded WEHOville. “It’s 2014, and those of us in gay-oriented media long ago realized that porn content denigrates the reputation of the gay audience among advertisers, who today appreciate us for our interest in politics, style and fashion rather than commercial sex.”

Asked for a response to this article, Here Media spokesman Mark Umbach emailed Queerty the following statement: “Here Media uses dozens of marketing techniques across all major search engines as well as native ads, display ads and text links on hundreds of web properties. As we own Gay.com, a prominent dating platform, adult sites have always been included in our marketing mix for the past 20 years.” (However, in dozens of searches by multiple editors for Here Media pop-unders on adult sites, the hookup site Gay.com never displayed. We saw only Out.com and Advocate.com and in dozens of instances.)

Oddly enough, we also noticed Out.com pop-unders (see above), featuring Tommy Hilfiger ads, appearing on myVidster, a site that posts pirated gay porn, making it the enemy of porn producers worldwide.

There you have it. From American Express to pirated porn, strange bedfellows at Here Media.

Chris Bull

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/b-JnNJO_i_4/how-the-publisher-of-advocate-out-use-porn-sites-to-inflate-traffic-and-deceive-advertisers-20141008

8 Twitter Pics Of Equality Denied In Idaho As Gay Couples Wait In Vain To Get Married: PHOTOS

Sean Mandell

www.towleroad.com/2014/10/equality-denied-in-idaho-as-gay-couples-wait-in-vain-to-get-married-photos.html

Supreme Court Puts Idaho and Nevada Marriages On Hold

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy granted Idaho’s request for a stay on yesterday’s order striking down the state’s marriage ban, as attorneys for the state’s Republican leadership prepare to appeal.

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Sunnivie Brydum

www.advocate.com/politics/marriage-equality/2014/10/08/supreme-court-puts-idaho-and-nevada-marriages-hold

Tampons Could Detect Ovarian Cancer In The Future
By: Anne Harding, LiveScience Contributing Writer
Published: 10/07/2014 05:49 PM EDT on LiveScience

Tampons could one day help doctors spot early-stage ovarian cancer in women at high risk for this deadly disease, a small new study suggests.

In the study, researchers found tumor DNA in cells trapped in ordinary tampons that were placed in the vaginas of ovarian cancer patients.

“In about 60 percent of patients who had their [fallopian] tubes still intact, we were able to pick up tumor cells, or essentially tumor DNA, in the vaginal tract,” said Dr. Charles Landen, an associate professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and one of the study researchers. (Having intact fallopian tubes is important to the findings because the tubes are the conduits that connect the ovaries with the lower parts of the reproductive system, including the uterus and the vagina.)

This detection rate was too low for the current form of the test to be used to screen women in the general population for ovarian cancer, and the supersensitive DNA testing technology the researchers employed was too expensive for widespread use, the researchers said in their study, published today (Oct. 7) in the journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

But the study shows that in principle, tampons could be used to detect the cancer, the researchers said. “It’s an important step toward the Holy Grail, but we’re certainly not there yet,” Landen told Live Science.

There will be an estimated 22,000 cases of ovarian cancer diagnosed in the United States during 2014, and about 14,000 women will die of the disease this year, according to the National Institutes of Health. Ovarian cancer is usually not detected until it has advanced. [5 Things Women Should Know About Ovarian Cancer]

Landen and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore wanted to investigate whether it might be possible to identify tumor cells that had migrated from the ovary to the vagina. So, for their study, they enrolled women who were about to undergo surgery for a pelvic mass.

Of the 33 patients in the study, eight had advanced serous ovarian cancer, the most common form of the disease. But three of these women had previously had their tubes tied, meaning there would be no way for a cancer cell in the ovary to travel down to the vagina.

In three of the five women who had intact fallopian tubes, the researchers found cells in the tampon with the exact same mutation, called a TP53 mutation, that they had found in the tumor itself — a sign that the cancer cells do, indeed, move from the upper parts of the reproductive tract into the vagina.

To spot the mutations in the cells within the tampons, the researchers used a type of DNA sequencing called deep sequencing, which is able to detect tiny fractions of mutated DNA in a sample. On average, mutated DNA made up just 0.05 percent of the total sample, Landen said.

“That’s the real power of the technology, but [the test] still needs to be a little bit better,” said Landen, who was at the University of Alabama at Birmingham at the time of the study. “What we need to do is pick up early-stage or even precancerous lesions, before it becomes malignant.”

The next step in the research will be to repeat the experiment in a larger group of women with ovarian masses, including some with early-stage ovarian cancer, Landen said. Meanwhile, his colleagues at Johns Hopkins are “tinkering” with the DNA test to see if it can be made more sensitive.

Previous attempts to develop screening tests for ovarian cancer haven’t worked because they are not sensitive enough to detect the cancer in large groups of women, Landen said. “That’s why a lot of the screening tests have failed — even though they’re pretty good, they’re not quite good enough.”

Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

• 5 Signs of Gynecological Cancer Women Ignore
• 7 Cancers You Can Ward Off with Exercise
• The 10 Deadliest Cancers and Why There’s No Cure

Copyright 2014 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/08/tampon-test-ovarian-cancer_n_5952102.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Pray, Listen, Discern: The Catholic Ideals of Family

Interim President at Pacific School of Religion reflects on Catholics long tradition of creating and celebrating their families. 
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/pray-listen-discern-the-catholic-ideals-of-family?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

Gay Dads Walk Their Stylish Modern Family Through Toronto

Check out this hip modern family taking a stroll through the park at the base of Toronto’s CN Tower.

The photo was posted on Imgur by Reddit gaybro TeenageDarren yesterday. The caption reads: “Saw This Family Walking Around Toronto. One Day…”

He says he took the photo himself, and judging by its setting, it looks like nobody cares that this same-sex couple is taking their three children on a casual afternoon stroll. Nothing to see here! Except progress!

Suspicious Reddit commenters point out that this could be two straight dads or actually a mother and father, since we’re only seeing them from behind and assuming they’re a family, but we know better than that. Only a gay couple would give their son a fedora.

Glad to see such a normal family living the dream!

h/t Imgur

Matthew Tharrett

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/rzHbiYjjIYs/gay-dads-walk-their-stylish-modern-family-through-toronto-20141008