Is ‘Wolverine’ the most homoerotic superhero movie ever?
True confession: I see the gay in everything. It’s a gift and a curse, much like Haley Joel Osment’s ability to chat with the dead in The Sixth Sense. After sitting through Wolverine this past weekend, I believe this flick to be the gayest comic book movie ever. It felt like an issue of Men’s Health come to life, albeit with more adamantium. First, the gorgeous Hugh Jackman is shirtless for a good portion of the film — he even has a naked fight scene! And he squares off against a shirtless (and similarly ripped) Ryan Reynolds at one point. Secondly, Wolverine’s job as a lumberjack allows him to wear some very 1970s gay-friendly tight jeans, leather jackets, and flannel shirts, unbuttoned to reveal more than a hint of chest hair. Thirdly, the big sparring between Wolverine and Sabretooth really comes down to two hot guys basically clawing each other with their fingernails. Catfight!
To me, this felt waaay gayer than Joel Schumacher’s codpiece- and nipple-enhanced Batman and Robin. What do you think PopWatchers? Anyone else catch a whiff of homoeroticism from all the male eye candy, or am I blowing things out of proportion?
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Entertainment Weekly
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In Military, New Debate Over Policy Toward Gays
WEST POINT, N.Y. — Here at the military academy that is nearly as old as the nation itself, two cadets recently engaged in a modern debate: whether they agreed with President Obama’s pledge to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and allow gay men and lesbians to serve openly.
“From what I’ve heard from my classmates, people are kind of against it,” said Daniel Szatkowski, a senior from Edmond, Okla. But Adrienne Rolle, a senior from Brooklyn, said she had no problem with lifting the ban, although she said that some of her male classmates did.
“People are more comfortable with ignorance,” Cadet Rolle said of the reality that gay men and lesbians already serve in the military.
West Point is not a perfect microcosm of the armed forces, but recent conversations with the cadets who will become the Army’s next generation of leaders reflect uncertainty about what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has characterized as a “complex and difficult problem.”
While Mr. Obama has promised to get rid of the 16-year-old policy that allows gay men and lesbians to serve only if they keep their sexual orientation secret, Mr. Gates has said that both he and the president want to push the issue “down the road a bit.”
Advocacy groups have stepped into the vacuum. The Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, which represents some of the 13,000 gay men and lesbians discharged from the military since the policy took effect, is intensifying lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill — changing the policy requires legislation — and calling on the president to make good on his word.
“If he doesn’t speak up, he’s going to end up O.K.’ing the firing of service members for being gay,” said Aubrey Sarvis, the group’s executive director.
In recent years, prominent retired generals and admirals have also urged repeal, among them Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when the policy was adopted after a blowup over the issue in the early days of the Clinton administration.
On the other side, some 1,000 retired officers supported by the conservative Center for Military Readiness sent an “open letter” to Mr. Obama saying they were “greatly concerned” about the impact of repeal on recruitment, morale and unit cohesion.
“How would women in the military feel if they were required to accommodate men in their private quarters?” said Elaine Donnelly, the center’s president.
Col. Thomas A. Kolditz, the chairman of West Point’s department of behavioral sciences and leadership who discusses “don’t ask, don’t tell” in his classes, said that cadets were roughly split for and against openly gay service but that most did not feel strongly about their views.
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New York Times* Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual
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Gay life on exhibit by Rob Bondgren
Examiner.com * Tags = gay men gay news lesbian news transgender bisexual
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Missed chance at grant a blow for The Center
HILLCREST — British poet Alexander Pope famously noted 300 years ago that to err is human, to forgive divine.
San Diego publisher Michael Portantino might not have been pondering “An Essay on Criticism” when he learned San Diego’s main community center for gays and lesbians missed a deadline to apply for a major grant.
But Portantino surely adopted Pope’s way of thinking when he wrote about the blunder in the Gay & Lesbian Times.
Instead of lambasting the San Diego Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center for failing to seek a city grant worth tens of thousands of dollars, the publisher urged readers to forgive the mistake and make up the difference with their own donations.
“There’s not a CEO of a company that hasn’t made a mistake,” Portantino said. “Anybody who doesn’t reach in their pocket and write out a check for $5, $10, $15 or $20 right now should be ashamed of themselves.”
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San Diego Union Tribune, CA
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They hugged! Lesbians expelled from high school
Back in my day, you had to wake up pretty early to get expelled from high school. You had to rise at the crack of dawn and sell drugs to the children of well-connected bankers and lawyers. You had to trudge a mile in the snow to flip off a teacher (like, repeatedly). You had to make some kind of threat, like: I’m going to blow up this stupid school. I think maybe you could also get expelled for wearing shorts above the knee. Such are the baffling, inexplicable rules of high school expulsion.
But even in my conservative Texas high school, you could not be expelled for being a lesbian. Far less for exhibiting “a bond of intimacy” that was “characteristic of a lesbian relationship” — which, by the way, sounds like approximately 86 percent of female friendships. But such was the case in California, where two 16-year-old girls were expelled for “conducting themselves in a manner consistent with being lesbians.” An appeals court recently ruled that “the private religious school was not a business and therefore did not have to comply with a state law that prohibits businesses from discriminating,” according to a story in today’s L.A. Times.
The Times story recounts the twisty tale that led a teacher (tipped off by a student) to probe the terrifying waters of MySpace, where she found such incendiary evidence as the fact that one of the students identified as a bisexual. There was also a photo of the two girls hugging. (Hugging?!?! Shouldn’t you get some kind of merit badge for that?) Seriously, the story is worth a read. At one point, the principal seems to be coming on to one girl. The tables keep turning. It’s like “Doubt” or something.
So, OK: It’s a private school that wants to uphold a certain religious ethos. (The school is associated with the same religious denomination as Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann. ) Should they be allowed to discriminate based on their shame-based ethos? I’ll leave that for the courts to decide. (A lawyer for the girls hopes to take the case to the California Supreme Court.) But at a time when our school system is so embattled — fingers crossed, economic stimulus plan — and at an age when kids are discovering themselves and in the very place you might hope adults would be trying to sheperd them into an adult world, it’s just a damn shame that a school would spend its valuable resources on this kind of witch hunt.
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BAN ON CIVIL UNIONS AT THE PUBLIC BOARDWALK PAVILIO N IN OCEAN GROVE, NEW JERSEY IS DISCRIMINATORY, RULES STATE DIVISION ON CIVIL RIGHTS
The Division ruled that the couple, Harriet Bernstein and Luisa Paster, have “probable cause” to claim that the ban violates New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination. Today’s opinion was based on the boardwalk pavilion’s being public by nature of its historic use, open to everyone for decades without restrictions. In fact, the Camp Meeting Association had for years advanced that very argument, by applying for – and receiving – state tax breaks under New Jersey’s “Green Acres” program that requires facilities to be open and nondiscriminatory to all.
As the Division on Civil Rights ruled today, the Camp Meeting Association’s ban was discriminatory because it has prohibited same-sex civil unions at the public boardwalk pavilion, but not opposite-sex marriages.
The decision in the latest in a series of blows to the Camp Meeting Association’s campaign to discriminate against same-sex couples. In September 2007, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection ended the Camp Meeting Association’s tax breaks for the public boardwalk pavilion area, based on the Association’s discriminatory ban on civil unions.
Garden State Equality and Ocean Grove United have been relentless in leading grassroots opposition to the ban – Garden State Equality at the statewide level and Ocean Grove United at the local level. The couple, Harriet Bernstein and Luisa Paster, are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey.
“Though we’re not home free yet, today’s decision by the Corzine Administration is a significant victory for liberty and justice for all in Ocean Grove,” said Steven Goldstein, chair of Garden State Equality. “The Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association has only itself to blame for pursuing a lawsuit that will cost it hundreds of thousands of dollars – and potentially millions of dollars in potential tourism to Ocean Grove, known across the country as a leading LGBT-friendly destination.
“The question is, how much more hell will the Camp Meeting Association, and its national right-wing extremist backers, put the good people of Ocean Grove through? We all know how this saga will wind up. The boardwalk will eventually be re-open to civil unions. Our side is winning juncture after juncture in this case because the law is overwhelmingly on our side. It’s time for the Camp Meeting Association to see the handwriting on the pavilion, and end its discriminatory ban now.”
In a second complaint against the Camp Meeting Association, the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights today ruled there was no probable cause, based solely on the timing of the complaint by the same-sex couple involved there, Jan Moore and Emily Sonnessa. They filed their complaint once the Camp Meeting Association decided to ban both opposite-sex weddings and same-sex civil unions at the boardwalk pavilion, thus preempting the question of discrimination against civil union couples.
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Feuding Dems may blow bid for NYS Senate control
(Albany, New York) Weeks after winning a majority of seats in the New York State Senate, Democratic infighting is threatening to hand control back to Republicans.
Democrats won 32 of the 62 Senate seats in November to capture the majority for the first time since 1965. But three conservative Democrats have …
A judicial blow to ‘Don’t Ask’
Court upholds ruling in
legal challenge to ban on openly gay personnel in the military.
