Band of Thebes

Brainy Gay Porn Star on his Cancelled College Sex Talk

If you dream of post-coital pillow talk that's all endosymbiosis and prokaryotes, Conner Habib is your homo erectus. The 35 year-old gay porn star won Best Newcomer at the GayVN awards in 2010, and he studied with Gaia genius Lynn Margulis, whom he considered a "second mom" until her death in 2011.

Despite a signed contract with Corning Community College to speak about sex and culture during the school's week of events on sexuality and sexual health, Conner got axed by the college president who worried about linking lgbt rights with porn. Thursday night, he spoke anyway, at the local library.

Part of his essay on the controversy:

"Where I grew up, just outside of Allentown, PA, I watched, right through my adolescence into adulthood and early college years, while straight people paired off and experienced sex. They were able to engage with a basic aspect of human life that seemed unavailable and distant to me. Unlike today, there was no discussion about gay marriage, nor were there many gay characters on TV. But even if there had been, neither would have rounded out my experience as a man with homosexual feelings because so many of those feelings were — unsurprisingly for a young man — sexual. Gay sex was a lonely venture. It wasn't easy to find, and was only mentioned in slurs and the butt of jokes. "Cocksucker" and "butt fucker" were insults; stand-ins for "faggot."

"Whether I bought it from the adult video store or, later, downloaded it, gay porn helped me encounter positive images of gay men enjoying the act of sex. Gay porn was a window into gay sexuality that was free of shame and guilt, and revealed a different world where sex wasn't a lonely prospect, confined to the shadows or just my imagination.

"This same concern is amplified in places where homosexuality is criminalized or even punishable by death.

"As a porn performer of Arab descent, I've received hundreds of emails from men in Middle Eastern countries expressing gratitude and relief for my having portrayed gay sex in a positive light on camera. When a gay man lives somewhere where his identity is threatened, it's clear how sex - including pornography - and sexuality are intertwined. His sexual imagination, which is criminalized, matches the sexual images of gay pornography (which are also criminalized). Since acting out his imagination through sex would be to risk his life, the access to the images is safer. The images, created by gay men wherever it's legal to create them, provide empowerment and diminish alienation."

Conner speaks this afternoon at the William Way lgbt center in Philadelphia. Catch him every week on his segment "Ask the Expert" at NewNextNow.

Perks & Plague: Support Queer Film This Weekend

After We Were Here and United in Anger, today's aids doc How To Survive a Plague has an average rating of 90 on Metacritic, meaning "universal acclaim." The San Francisco Chronicle says it "lingers as a testament to extraordinary human bravery. It stands as one of the most heartbreaking and suspenseful sagas of the year." It opens in NYC, LA, SF, and Chicago; next week: DC, Atlanta, and Cambridge.

Stephen Chbosky's million-copy-selling first novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower is now a movie that he adapted and directed. Most critics have singled out its gay character, Patrick, played by Ezra Miller. EW gave the movie an A, citing Patrick as "a kind of teenage Oscar Wilde played by the mesmerizing Ezra Miller... The movie is tough-minded: It zeroes in on Patrick's anger at dating a closeted football star." (The quarterback is played by Johnny Simmons, right in OUT's moody photo.) Salon's Andrew O'Hehir writes:

"Here he takes one of the most hackneyed central-casting roles in the lexicon – the wisecracking gay sidekick, who covers his pain with laughter – and fills every moment with awkward significance... Patrick is trying on semi-adult masks to see if they fit. He’s doing so in that confusing post-Harvey Milk, pre-gay marriage era when LGBT rights was emerging as a national issue but options for real-life gay kids in suburbia were pretty limited."

On the lasting importance of pop entertainment, Daniel Mendelsohn's new essay revisits landmark gay TV moments, from Paul Lynde to Dynasty to Brideshead to Will & Grace to the Glee kiss that made him cry.

The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont

Months after all that glittery praise for the debut prep school novel The Starboard Sea [Kindle], which the Washington Post critic compared to Gatsby but I rejected for its Ralph Laureny jacket, I've finally been oh-so-elegantly clobbered into understanding the book is built around a gay romance. One of my dearest chums and favorite readers reports:

"As you probably already know, The Starboard Sea makes the unfortunate but highly traditional mistake of punishing gay sex and love with violent death. It compounds this error with an unconvincing second act demi-romance (possibly presented as a redemption of sorts) with a wan and thinly drawn young woman. Yet between this treacherous Scylla and Charybdis plot channel lies some breathtaking writing about the protagonist's love for Cal, his former roommate, and for sailing and for sailing with Cal. Delicate, subtle, poignant, evocative, deeply moving, gorgeous, lovely. You want the book to be just Jason and Cal, hermetically sealed in their dorm room and out on the infinity of open sea. But you're grateful for what is there, because it's so alive and touching."

Unspeakable

Today is GLSEN's National Day of Silence, on which students vow to take a form of silence to call attention to the silencing effect of anti-LGBT bullying and harassment in schools. It began at UVA in 1996 and has spread to more than 8,000 middle schools, high schools, colleges and universities across the country.

Enforced silence is also spreading. After Tennessee's advancement of a "Don't Say Gay" bill, Missouri is now considering a law that would make illegal any "discussion, material, or extracurricular activity" that discusses sexual orientation in school grades K-12. 

Meanwhile, Mitt Romney hired an openly gay spokesman, Ric Grenell, to cover national security and foreign policy.

BYU Queers Say It Gets Better as LDS Works To Repeal Gay Marriage

All weekend the internets swooned over these lesbian, gay, and bi students at Brigham Young University making an It Gets Better video. Although it may be useful as a suicide prevention PSA and helpful in bringing incremental change to some of their families and friends, the students are willingly or unwillingly being used as part of the Mormon PR blitz promoting the false claim that LDS isn't homophobic. The attractive, articulate gay kids play up the university's "tolerance" but they forget to mention they're not allowed to have sex. Ever. Mandatory lifelong celibacy is not acceptance. Nor is excommunication. Don't attack me for calling them church apologists. One of these boys complains to the Salt Lake Tribune, "I feel like there’s been a very negative light cast on Mormons when it comes to LGBT issues."

After their success stripping gay couples of marriage equality in California and Maine, now some Mormons are forming a coalition of several faiths trying to repeal Maryland's new gay marriage law. This week the Blade reports on their process:

“We need to collect approximately 200,000 signatures by the end of May,” the email states. “We are looking for people to gather signatures within the LDS community.”

I respect the BYU students' youthful optimism, their efforts to reach suicidal teens, and their desire to bring change to a bigoted instution. The time to trumpet LDS tolerance is after they've reversed the church's official position, not now. Here's a Los Angeles Times photo of some Mormons and others who had worked to undo marriage equality, reacting to Prop 8's victory.

Weinstein Co. Degays BULLY Trailer

Is it a case of words hurt, or is it words hurt boxoffice? For the past month a media cause celebre has been the irony of the MPAA slapping the documentary Bully with an R rating, meaning kids under 17 can't see a film about their own lives without a parent accompanying them. Meryl, Ellen, Justin Bieber, and Drew Brees are among the 300,000 people to sign 17 year-old Katy Butler's petition asking the film board to change the rating to PG-13. Even politicians are on board, with Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA) telling the LAT it "seems really counterintuitive" and Rep. Hansen Clarke (D-MI) citing the board's "hypocrisy" about violence. If celebrities and powerbrokers really want to discuss "irony" and "hypocrisy," let's talk about why the Bully trailer makes no mention of gay students, antigay bullying, homophobia, queer suicide, or the other F-word. Lambda Legal reports 86% of LGBTQ kids say they've been bullied at school because of their sexual orientation. A new Columbia University study says queer teens are five times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. Bully opens March 30 in New York and Los Angeles and expands to fifteen more cities on April 13.

The New Yorker Profiles the Tyler Clementi Case

This week, The New Yorker's lead story is a lumbering, 12,800-word rehash of gay Rutgers student Tyler Clementi's suicide and his roommate's upcoming trial for invasion of privacy. The magazine too rarely covers gay topics, and this, their one take on gay teen suicide, doesn't include any of the major issues facing most gay teen suicides. It's like reporting on Africa by touring the Seychelles. People are drawn to this case because it exploits fears of internet exposure and because it's just plain sad. Yet it has nothing to say about actual bullying, unresponsive or complicit school officials, family rejection, extreme isolation, religious bigotry, or antigay politicking, or about unlikely pockets of support. Many people will read the piece and come away thinking it's a heartbreaking tale of a lonely college kid who made a terrible choice on a bad night... but what are angry gays complaining about? (Clementi was not outed by the hidden webcam and a total of maybe seven people saw images for a few seconds of him and another guy with their shirts off and their jeans on. His text messages after discovering the spying are full of lols and hahahaha and that all in all his roomie was "pretty decent," though hours later he did request a roommate change.) If you can get past sentences like "His sexual self—born on the Internet, in the shadow of pornography—seems to have been largely divorced from his social self," read the whole essay here.

Readers who are not sufficiently depressed by the main story can dwell on the scene of closeted Anderson Cooper at Rutgers a year later to host a tv special called "Bullying: It Stops Here," where a CNN manager talked to the student audience prior to taping to "coach them on how to express shock or grief while watching the panel." 

A great writer exploring this subject could produce another In Cold Blood. The place to do it is Tennessee, whose legislature is still deliberating their "Don't Say Gay" bill. The state offers plenty of grotesque hatred like Rep. Floyd of Chattanooga standing by his statements that he would "stomp a mudhole" in any man [trans] who tried to use the women's dressing room while his wife or daughter was there. But, less publicized, even rural Tennesseans have shown a tremendous outpouring of gay support. Two recent suicides there were Phillip Parker, 14, whose parents repeatedly complained to his school, and Jacob Rogers, whose friends say he was abused "every day in every class." As I wrote last week, Rogers asked for an Easy Bake Oven when he was six and shot himself at eighteen. 

Gay Teen Suicides Continue

On New Year's Day, Jeffrey Fehr, 18, [left] hanged himself in the front entrance of his family's house in Sacramento. His father said, "For years and years, people knocked him down for being different. It damaged him. It wore on him. He could never fully believe how wonderful he was, and how many people loved him." Nearly 1,000 attended his funeral.

In October, Eric James Borges' "extremist Christian" family disowned him for being gay. Nineteen, he was a volunteer in suicide prevention with the Trevor Project and in December he made this It Gets Better video. He killed himself in Visalia, California on January 13.

Bullying target Phillip Parker, 14, [right] repeatedly told his grandmother he felt like he had a rock on his chest and he just wanted to take the rock off so he could breathe. He was out to his supportive parents who "reported their concerns over their son's bullying to Gordonsville [Tennessee] High School on multiple occasions, but the bullying by a group of students just got worse." Last week he killed himself.

Last month another Tennessean, Jacob Rogers, 18, [left] committed suicide after enduring years of antigay bullying. A friend from school said, "It was like every day, every class." School officials defended their [in]actions, discussed "rumors of previous bullying," and refused to return a reporter's calls. Emotions running high, a school counselor was kicked out of Jacob's funeral. When he was six, Jacob begged for and received an Easy Bake Oven, and the newspaper speculates that no one was surprised when he came out at 14. Obsessed with Gaga, he shared his clothes with girlfriends. His home life was complicated at best. His mother recently moved out of the state and Jacob struggled with an eating disorder, frequent school absences, alcohol, drugs, poor grades, and trouble with health insurance after he turned 18. He shot himself on December 7.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/01/15/4188596/granite-bay-teen-who-committed.html#storylink=cp

Jamey's Bullies Chant 'We're Glad You're Dead' after Tribute

Some of the students believed to have bullied 14 year-old Jamey Rodemeyer [left] before his suicide protested a Lady Gaga tribute to him at North High School's homecoming dance by chanting "We're glad you're dead" and "You're better off dead." Jamey's remarkably poised sister Alyssa told Anderson Cooper about the incident.

Among the many questions: Do the bullies run completely unchecked in feral packs? Does principal Petrina Neureuter have any authority at all? Her letter to parents was toothless and strictly CYA. In February 2010, North junior Joe Chearmonte, 17, a skier and gymnast [right], killed himself, allegedly after bullying from peers.

Two Videos

 

A very nervous airman Randy Phillips, 21, called home from Germany as soon as the DADT repeal was enacted, to say, "Dad, I'm gay. Do you still love me?" Mr. Phillips said, "Yes."

Jamey Rodemeyer, 14, posted a video called "It Gets Better, I Promise!" but years of anti-gay bullying wore him down and he killed himself last weekend. Typical comments on his blog included: "Kill your self!!!! You have nothing left!" "Listen to us, you're a bad person, you don't belong here, jump off a bridge or something!" "Go kill yourself, you're worthless, ugly and dont have a point to live." "You werent born this way. You shouldnt have ever been born." Buffalo-area police are investigating three individuals to "determine whether to charge some students with harassment, cyber-harassment or hate crimes." His final Facebook post before he died was to thank Lady Gaga. Yesterday the pop star tweeted that she is meeting with Obama to discuss anti-gay bullying. Jamey's mother said she is burying her son in a Born This Way t-shirt.

Back to School: Banned Books, Naked Golfers, Bi Dudes

Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas has suspended the entire men's golf team for three tournaments because of this photo. Team captain Jack Hiscock is appealing. The native Brit says his bit of fun with the lads has got blown out of proportion.

In Monroe Township, New Jersey, angry parents at Williamstown High School have succeeded in removing two books from reading lists because the works depict lgbt sex and drug use. The tenth grade list had Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood which includes a lesbian sex scene between a 31 year-old woman and 13 year-old student. The honors English senior list had Nic Sheff's Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines which obviously includes drug use and, just slightly less obviously, a gay orgy.

Six years after researchers at Northwestern University said bisexual males do not exist, now other Northwestern scientists have discovered that yes, they do. Boston's Bisexual Resource Center president Ellyn Ruthstrom told the NYT:

“This unfortunately reduces sexuality and relationships to just sexual stimulation. Researchers want to fit bi attraction into a little box — you have to be exactly the same, attracted to men and women, and you’re bisexual. That’s nonsense. What I love is that people express their bisexuality in so many different ways.”

CBS News reports that bisexuals responded to the findings with, "Duh."

Fatter and Stupider, But #1 in Self-Esteem

WALL-E nailed it: In the future, no one walks; they just sit and eat and watch the screen.

In 1995, no state had an obesity rate of 20%. Now, no state doesn't. The new study from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reports the worst is Mississippi with 34.4%, the best is Colorado with 19.8%. Nine of the ten fattest states are in the south. Nine of the ten thinnest less fat states are politically blue. The Wall Street Journal, of all places, discusses the link between obesity and poverty.

The FY2011 federal budget cuts $833 million to nutrition programs for children and families. Guess what we spend annually on air-conditioning our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq? $20 billion.

The Mayo Clinic says one's average daily intake should be approx. 2,000 calories and 44 to 78 grams of fat. On Burger King's site, the total for the biggest burger sandwich, large fries, a large shake, and dessert is 2950 calories and 144 grams of fat.

A couple weeks ago America learned that only 12% of high school seniors are "proficient" in history. I probably wasn't alone in imagining that, awful as the widening gap is, at least our smartest smarties is like reely supersmarts, rite? Wrong again. "The top five percent of our students, our very best, rank 23rd out of 29 developed countries," according to Waiting for Superman. The documentary also reports the one area in which U.S. students rank #1 is self-esteem. Watch the clip.

Two nights ago Rachel Maddow reeled off an alarming number of broke counties that are switching to four-day school weeks, not by choice, but because they can no longer afford five days of schooling. Currently twenty-one states allow the shorter option, and it's already in effect in more than 120 school districts, mostly rural. Getting a three-day weekend every week won't make those kids smarter. It will make them fatter.

California Law Requires Schools To Teach LGBT History to All Grades

California will not be gay topped by New York. They had gay marriage before the Empire State and, yesterday, a first in the nation, the California Assembly passed a bill that requires schools to include the accomplishments of LGBT people in their history lessons at all grade levels. Gov. Brown is expected to sign it. The bill's sponsor, Mark Leno, said:

"It’s no different than instructing students about the historical role of an African-American man by the name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., fighting for civil rights and being assassinated for his efforts than teaching students about a gay American man by the name of Harvey Milk fighting for every man’s civil rights and being assassinated for his efforts. Why deny all students the benefit of that knowledge?"

For anyone concerned about teaching queer history in kindergarten, relax and look at San Francisco. The city adopted this curriculum nearly twenty years ago and it's been in place since 1992.

Meanwhile, in May the Tennessee Senate passed a bill that would make it illegal for teachers to mention homosexuality in any context before ninth grade. That bill is expected to go to the house in 2012.

Good time to review Debra Chasnoff's awesome documentary It's Elementary from 1996.

Maine Twinks Voted Prom King & Queen

This year's obligatory story of a high school gay couple winning prom queen and king comes from Sanford, Maine, population 20,798. Just like Lisa Murkowski, the boys won through a write-in ballot campaign. Christian Nelsen was named prom queen. His boyfriend, the king, has the most adult-film-industry-ready name you've heard so far this week, Caleb Jett.

The Jack Bank by Glen Retief

Like male aggression itself, young schoolboy bullying is everywhere this season, playing a central part in the indie documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, the Oscar winning foreign film In a Better World, those ubitiquous YouTube videos for the It Gets Better campaign which is now a book [[Kindle]], and bullying is the troubled heart of Glen Retief's new autobiography The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood [[Kindle]]. Toward the end of aparthied, white Glen lives in bliss at Kruger National Park, until at 12 he is sent to a hellish boarding school where older boys make younger boys strip nude, jump up and down and receive swattings with cricket bats or electrical shocks to their genitals. Trouble is, when Glen is older he derives "enormous, surprising pleasure" from administering the beatings to younger boys. He connects the Boer system of abuse and torture to South Africa's greater ills, and he struggles to reconcile the shameful experiences that he considers "life's defining moment" with his homosexuality.

Not my kind of book but those who've read it are impressed:

“A remarkable memoir with the deeply resonant literary power of the finest fiction. The Jack Bank  is an important book by a supremely gifted writer.”—Robert Olen Butler

“One of those books that you never forget and never stop talking about.  Retief belongs in the pantheon of white African writers Alexandra Fuller, Peter Godwin, Coetzee, and Gordimer.”—Bob Shacochis

“Glen Retief’s Jack Bank is a transgressive, harrowing and illuminating work of literary art.  In a language marked by a brutal childhood in the last years of the apartheid regime, and with uncommon wisdom, Retief’s epiphanic narrative draws us into regions of  cultural importance beyond the scope of traditional memoir.  Thus, he changes what we imagine this genre to be, allowing it to become something truer.”—Carolyn Forché

"Eloquent...readers everywhere will be caught by the searing detail about family, friendship, sex and love."—Booklist

"Visceral and emotionally complex--an impressive first book."—Kirkus Reviews

ACLU Intervenes, 18 yo Lesbian Belinda Sanchez Will Wear Tux to Prom

If you're looking for a Tuesday morning hero, why not Belinda Sanchez? The 18 year-old lesbian is a senior at Maywood, Illinois' Proviso East High School, whose student body is 70% black and 24% Latino. Belinda has been out since she was a freshman and says the school, which has a GSA, is very accepting of LGBT students. So she was "just shocked" to hear the principal tell her she had to wear a dress -- not a tuxedo -- to the prom on April 22. Belinda hopes to become a civil rights lawyer, and she knew whom to call: The ACLU. The group's LGBT Project director John Knight said,

"This sends a negative message to other students that they can't express who they are. It's a First Amendment right, a free speech right, and that includes her right to send a message through wearing male clothing that she doesn't think women should be restricted to traditional female clothing."

The ACLU sent a concerned letter to the school board, which overruled the principal's decision. District spokesperson TaQuoya Kennedy praised Belinda for opening "up a new, very interesting and healthy dialogue in terms of our prom review procedures. We support our students in all of their differences and we encourage them to express themselves in various ways as long as it is not disruptive to the school environment."

Belinda told the Chicago Tribune, "I'm happy. I didn't just stand up for myself. I did this for everyone who's in a position like I'm in."

(Photo by Michael Tercha, Chicago Tribune)

It's Not Just Kurt: LA Times Looks at LGBT Characters on Teen Shows

Today's Los Angeles Times has a story about all the LGBT characters coming out on teen television shows and for once LGBT actually means L, G, B, and T. Degrassi features a high school trans character named Adam played by the actress Jordan Todosey. Pretty Little Liars has a fulltime lesbian and some questioning girls. Beyond Glee, queer characters can also be found on Hellcats, Gossip Girl, Greek, Skins, Ugly Betty and 90210 whose Teddy (played by Trevor Donovan, pictured) broke up with a girl, hooked up with a guy as a rebound, and realized he's gay. Several producers discussed their desire to break stereotypes, for example by making the gay boys jocks.

Happily, there's no backlash from viewers. Says Pretty Little Liars producer Oliver Goldstick, "I'm often delightfully surprised at how unshocked young people are. They just move on. It's like: OK."

 

Utah Schools' Gay-Straight Alliances Increase 255% in Past Year

In January 2010 the total number of Gay-Straight Alliances in Utah public high schools was nine; today it's thirty-two. Whether or not the sharp rise is a reaction against the increasingly visible anti-gay role of the Mormon church -- the LDS president's remarks against homosexuality prompted a demonstration in Salt Lake by 4,000 protesters -- the NYT identifies a "new activism by gay and lesbian students, an organizing drive by a gay rights group and the intervention of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has threatened to sue districts that put up arbitrary hurdles." The paper points out that "the alliances must still work around a 2007 state law that was expressly intended to stifle them by requiring parental permission to join and barring any discussions of sexuality or contraception, even to prevent diseases." Typically, the anti-gay conservatives portray the clubs as "recruiting." Pictured is the Utah Pride Center's Eric Hamren who trains student organizers.

In a separate article, the NYT's Erik Eckholm profiles Jason Osmanski, now 17 and the leader of the new GSA at Snow Canyon High School, who realized he was gay when he was 7. After enduring years of trauma and depression, he came out to his mother in Wal-Mart when he was 14 and 11 months. She said, "If you are joking, you are grounded for life." He wasn't.

Anyone interested in the plight of gay teens struggling with the entrenched anti-gay policies of the LDS should get to know Jordan Scott at the heart of David Ebershoff's excellent novel The 19th Wife [[Kindle]].

Four Recent Gay Teen Suicides

Two points: If 13 year-olds are killing themselves after "years of torment" from classmates, you might need to rethink your belief that 5th and 6th grade is too young to discuss gay issues with. Also, are early teen lesbians more resilient, less self-destructive, or not picked on as much?

Two weeks ago last Thursday, Billy Lucas, 15, endured another day of antigay bullying at Greensburg High School, southwest of Indianapolis, including being told that he should kill himself, and after school hanged himself in his grandmother's barn. The school principal says he was unaware of any problem. After Lucas's death, the Facebook page set up to memorialize Billy featured comments from classmates making fun of the way he died, mocking his cowardice, and calling him antigay slurs.

 

A week ago Sunday, Seth Walsh, 13, hanged himself from a tree in his backyard in Tehachapi, California. He had been bullied by antigay classmates for years, and had finally switched out of a traditional classroom to independent study to avoid them. According to CBS News, "Police investigators interviewed some of the young people who taunted Seth the day he hanged himself, and determined despite the tragic outcome of their ridicule, their actions do not constitute a crime, reported KGET. "Several of the kids that we talked to broke down into tears," Jeff Kermode, Tehachapi Police Chief, said. "They had never expected an outcome such as this." After lingering on life support for nine days, Seth died yesterday. He is an organ donor. Friends made the video below during that time.

Last Wednesday Asher Brown, 13, came out to his supportive stepfather in the morning, went to school where he had long been relentlessly bullied for his small size, poverty, and being gay, returned home, and shot himself with his stepfather's 9 mm Beretta in his stepfather's closet. His parents say they had complained to the Houston-area school officials for 18 months about their son's mistreatment, to no effect. School officials now maintain the parents never contacted them. A local tv station interviewed many students and parents who say they knew Asher was harassed and that bullying in the school goes unchecked because officials do not want to cross the popular kids and their parents. Asher Brown got straight A's. You can sign a petition to the Houston school system.

 

Last Wednesday Tyler Clementi, 18, jumped off the GW Bridge. The Rutgers gay freshman committed suicide after he was caught on hidden webcams in a dorm room having sex with another male student on September 19 and again on September 21. The boy who set up the webcams, Dharun Ravi, posted to Twitter on September 19: "I went into Molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay." Dharun and Molly, both 18, have been arrested on multiple counts of invasion of privacy, carrying a maximum penalty of five years in jail.

 

Also check out Dan Savage's new viral video project It Gets Better, urging lgbt teens not to give up.

Gay Male Cheerleader Prom King, Gay Best Friend Prom Queen

Progress: Way back in the unenlightened year of 2008, upstate's Hudson High School officials refused to honor openly gay male drama student Augie Abatecola's victory as Prom Queen. (Augie said, "It kind of stinks," but then he spent the summer touring Europe with American Music Abroad, so he got over it.) Last fall, senior Charlie Ferrusi was interviewed as the school's first and only male cheerleader and he emphasized twice in the brief article that male cheerleading is not gay and a lot of guys who do male cheerleading are not gay, because they're not:

"Stereotypes like all male cheerleaders are gay, is definitely not true in any way, explains Ferrusi.

"I want people to know, that it’s not as girly as people think, I don’t do a lot of the moves the girls do. The cheers are altered for me so they are more manly. I participate mainly in stunting and in competition levels there are a lot of guys and a lot of them are not gay.”

Last month, Charlie [crown], now openly gay, and gay best friend Timmy Howard [tiara] floated the idea of running for prom king & queen, and this time the same school officials approved the move. Last Saturday, the boys won in a landslide victory so overwhelming the school did not even bother to crown anyone else in the prom court! Who couldn't see this sort of problem looming but the boys confessed the hardest part of the experience was deciding who would be king and who would be queen.

Charlie told a reporter, “For me to win king was crazy. For Timmy to win queen was insane."

Next weekend, both boys will appear in Hudson's first ever gay pride parade, organized by Trixie Starr.