Why women are leaving men for other women
Lately, a new kind of sisterly love seems to be in the air. In the past few years, Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon left a boyfriend after a decade and a half and started dating a woman (and talked openly about it).
Actress Lindsay Lohan and DJ Samantha Ronson flaunted their relationship from New York to Dubai. Katy Perry’s song “I Kissed a Girl” topped the charts. “The L Word,” “Work Out,” and “Top Chef” are featuring gay women on TV, and there’s even talk of a lesbian reality show in the works.
Certainly nothing is new about women having sex with women, but we’ve arrived at a moment in the popular culture when it all suddenly seems almost fashionable — or at least, acceptable.
Statistics on how many women have traded boyfriends and husbands for girlfriends are hard to come by. Although the U.S. Census Bureau keeps track of married, divorced, single, and even same-sex partners living together, it doesn’t look for the stories behind those numbers.
But experts like Binnie Klein, a Connecticut-based psychotherapist and lecturer in Yale’s department of psychiatry, agree that alternative relationships are on the rise.
“It’s clear that a change in sexual orientation is imaginable to more people than ever before, and there’s more opportunity — and acceptance — to cross over the line,” says Klein, noting that a half-dozen of her married female patients in the past few years have fallen in love with women. “Most are afraid that if they don’t go for it, they’ll end up with regrets.” http://CNN.com
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-women-are…
Sacha Baron Cohen: The men in his life
His latest alter ego, a gay Austrian fashionista, is already hailed as a work of genius. But can Sacha Baron Cohen ever just be himself?
Photo: Sacha Baron Cohen as the fashion journalist Brüno
They didn’t know, the Alabama National Guard. Never realised that allowing a German documentary-maker into their high-security training camp 65 miles east of Birmingham would go so wrong. They certainly couldn’t have guessed, when they agreed to let him take part in training, that this curiously effeminate man would adorn his US military uniform with a white D&G belt, or strip in front of a locker room-full of crew-cut squaddies to reveal a camouflage thong.
Ron Paul didn’t twig, either, that a TV interview that was supposed to be about Austrian economics might end in a candle-lit hotel bedroom, where a blond male journalist would proffer cheap champagne before attempting to seduce him. Never, in his wildest dreams, could the 73-year-old hero of the Republican right have envisioned that a predatory homosexual would have the gall to suddenly drop his trousers. That’s why Paul ran away shouting: “This is ENDED!”
Then there was the crowd lured to a fairground in Fort Smith, Arkansas, on the promise of one-dollar beer and “blue-collar brawling”. They expected to spend the evening watching good, old-fashioned fisticuffs. Instead, the cage-fighting took an unexpected turn when a contestant called “Straight Dave” and his opponent stopped wrestling and started, in the words of a police report, “stripping down to their underwear, kissing and rubbing” each other.
How could that crowd have guessed? How could they possibly have realised, in a town where men are men and “gay” is a form of insult, that a pair of tough-guys would start canoodling, and force them to watch? Little wonder they promptly started a riot. Whoever you happen to be, what other emotion, except extreme anger, is the natural reaction to being “punked” by Sacha Baron Cohen?
It’s been a while, now, since this ludicrously talented British comedian burst onto the scene. A decade since his character Ali G first demonstrated that you can make highly intelligent people say incredibly revealing things by asking them the stupidest questions imaginable. Three years since his Kazakhstani alter ego, Borat, toured Middle America exposing staggering levels of misogyny, anti-Semitism, and public ignorance.
But now he’s back. This summer, Baron Cohen will complete his trio of “mockumentary” films with a movie following the flamboyant exploits of Brüno, an outrageously camp fashion reporter from Klagenfurt, whose “MeinSpace” page proudly declares: “If I vas a Starbucks drink, ich vould be a tall, skinny Austrian mit a great personality und a really big brains.”
The film boasts the extended title Delicious Journeys Through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt. That pretty much sums up what the film is about. Firstly, Brüno’s preposterous vanity will expose the excesses of a fashion industry (and celebrity culture) obsessed with body image and consumerism. Secondly, his overbearing homosexuality will be used as a tool to generate, expose, and thus satirise public homophobia.
See Sacha Baron Cohen: The men in his life
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/04/sacha-baron-c…
Iowans receiving calls from Rep. King
U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, has a reputation, and he’s not afraid to use it.
“For some reason my voice is distinct and people recognize my voice and also my name and they associate it whole family effort,” King said. “I don’t know if anybody in the state would do that message in a fashion that could be more effective.”
That message comes in the form of automated calls from King, who first asks whether residents throughout the state support the recent Iowa Supreme Court decision to allow same-sex marriage.
Resident Joni Gillispie supports the Supreme Court decision and told the congressman’s voice that when she answered the phone Tuesday afternoon. After that, all she heard was a click and dial tone telling her the call was over.
“If they say that this … judge-made law is a good idea, then we don’t keep them on the phone much longer than that, as you can imagine,” King said.
King is doing the calls in collaboration with long-time friend and head of the National Organization of Marriage Maggie Gallagher. He said he simply wanted to lend a hand to the organization’s effort. He said by working with NOM, it allows him to draw on their national resources, rather than take from Iowa.
“It’s important to get the message out and get them mobilized,” King said.
For those like resident Leo Hallowell who don’t agree with the decision, the calls ask the residents to contact their lawmakers to request a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. See
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/04/iowans-receiv…
Scholarship named for Lawrence King
(Los Angeles, California) A four-year scholarship for LGBT students will be named for Lawrence King, the 15-year-old gay male murdered in an Oxnard, California classroom in February 2008.
The scholarship was announced Tuesday by the Point Foundation in partnership with Jeffrey Fashion Cares. It will begin in the 2009/2010 academic year.
“It …
Scholarship named for Lawrence King
(Los Angeles, California) A four-year scholarship for LGBT students will be named for Lawrence King, the 15-year-old gay male murdered in an Oxnard, California classroom in February 2008.
The scholarship was announced Tuesday by the Point Foundation in partnership with Jeffrey Fashion Cares. It will begin in the 2009/2010 academic year.
“It …
