Since I know we have some Josh Hutcherson fans here...

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/gossip/2...award.html

Quote:As part of the Los Angeles stop on their annual Media Awards circuit Hutcherson is to receive the Van Guard award, handed to one who increases the visibility and understanding of LGBT folks.

"Emerging as a leader in a new generation of equality advocates, Josh Hutcherson has consistently used his platform to help young people understand that no one should face discrimination simply because of who they are," said newly christened GLAAD President Herndon Graddick in a statement.

Hutcherson is involved in "Straight But Not Narrow," a campaign backed by several young actors including "Glee's" Cory Monteith, encouraging straight youth to accept their LGBT peers.

Josh is the award's youngest recipient. Previous winners include Jennifer Aniston, Charlize Theron, Whoopi Goldberg and the late TV mogul Aaron Spelling

Nasty creature.

Quote:Man gets jail time for ejaculating into co-worker's water bottle, must register as sex offender.

Michael Lallana booking photo A Fullerton man was sentenced Friday to six months in jail and three years' probation for twice depositing his semen into a co-worker's water bottle, which she later drank from.

Michael Kevin Lallana, 32, also was ordered by the court to register as a sex offender, according to the Orange County District Attorney's office.

He left semen-laced water bottles on his co-worker’s desk at Northwestern Mutual Finance Network in Newport Beach last year on two separate occasions, district attorney officials said in a statement.

Prosecutors said Lallana committed the crime for sexual gratification.

“He admitted that he was attracted to her, and that it was something about her lips having touched the water bottle that turned him on,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Brock Zimmon said.

The first incident occurred in January 2010 when the victim discarded the water bottle after realizing it was contaminated, prosecutors said.

Four months later, Lallana again deposited his semen into a water bottle and left it on the woman's desk, prosecutors said. She drank from the bottle and detected an “off” taste, her attorney said.
She preserved the bottle and sent it to a private laboratory for testing. She learned two months later that the water bottle contained semen, at which point she notified authorities.

Lallana was arrested last July, and his DNA later was matched to the water bottle. He did not testify at his trial.

His attorneys argued he did not commit criminal battery because there was no application of force, Zimmon said. They also contended Lallana was driven by “narcissistic personality disorder,” not sexual purposes, Zimmon said.

“Their excuse was that he just did this because he was immature,” Zimmon said.

The victim issued an impact statement Friday to the court Friday, saying Lallana’s actions had harmed her emotionally and physically and that she felt it was a form of rape.

“Mr. Lallana has stripped me of my ability to trust,” she said.

Her attorney, Gloria Allred, said the most important aspect of the sentencing was that Lallana must register as a sex offender.

“This is not a joke or a prank, this is serious conduct,” Allred said in an interview. “It’s disgusting and revolting and disturbing.”

Lallana’s attorney Eduardo Madrid declined to comment.

Nice write up in NY Times about religious Jewish gay couple.
Vows: Chris Barley and Marc Kushner
Published: April 13, 2012

Quote:DURING a summer internship in 2007, Chris Barley thought that he had found a mentor in the architect Marc Kushner. Both were 6-foot-4, dapperly handsome and from religious families.

Mr. Barley, a Mennonite from Pennsylvania Dutch country who had come to New York to study architecture at Columbia after graduating from Carnegie Mellon and working construction, quickly discovered that the admiration was mutual.

Yet Mr. Kushner, who was raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish household in Livingston, N.J., did not have much work for the intern — he was half of a two-person firm that was just starting. To get Mr. Barley to stick around, he made up tasks, even asking him to walk his sister’s dog, which he was watching for the summer while she was out of the country.

“I was, like, the worst boss,” said Mr. Kushner, who received a master’s in architecture from Harvard. “I was mostly just concerned with getting him to like me.”

“He was different than other guys,” he continued. “There’s this kind of quiet optimism about him, not like the jaded world-weary New Yorker blah types that were everywhere else.”

Mr. Kushner began inviting Mr. Barley to dinner or to the movies, “like it was a normal thing for a boss and an employee to do this kind of thing,” Mr. Kushner said.

Mr. Barley said he found Mr. Kushner “amazingly enthusiastic.”

“He just has such an exuberance and joy about him, and that’s not common for architects,” he added. “They’re usually cynical and wear black.”

Each learned how different their lives had been up to that point. Mr. Barley, now 30, remembers a childhood of “picnics, cakes, pies,” herding cattle and raising tobacco and sweet corn on his grandfather’s farm. Bible study was a form of recreation. Dating and dancing were not allowed, but Mr. Barley didn’t mind. “I was a great little Mennonite,” he said.

“He grew up in, like, butter-land, I’m from margarine-ville,” said Mr. Kushner, now 34. “My family is all hyperactive ‘Oh, my God, we’re late, we have to achieve and right now!’ ”

Mr. Kushner’s boyhood leisures involved “indoorsy” pursuits, like watching television on his family’s many television sets. (Mr. Barley’s family’s set broke in the 1980s and still has not been replaced.)

The Kushners have long been prominent in real estate development and philanthropy in New Jersey and New York. (Jared Kushner, the owner of The New York Observer, is a first cousin.) Marc Kushner’s elementary school, the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy, was named for his paternal grandfather, a Holocaust survivor from what is now Belarus who founded the family business. He said that he and his brothers and sister were expected to work hard and to prove themselves.

Mr. Kushner was in high school when he came to realize that he was gay, but did not tell his parents until he was a senior at the University of Pennsylvania.

“When he came home from college totally buff with bleach blond hair and tortoiseshell glasses, they were like: something’s up,” said his sister, Melissa Kushner. “Then he said he was gay, and it was like, well, should we be upset about him being gay or about his bleached hair?”

Mr. Kushner said that “in the end, their attitude was that just because I was gay didn’t mean that the rules weren’t the same,” he said. That meant keeping a kosher home and marrying someone Jewish.

“To me, that was the ultimate sign of acceptance, that the ideas of the family and what family believes in still apply,” he said.

Mr. Barley had not told his family that he was gay and said he had not had a romantic relationship until he and Mr. Kushner began dating.

He quit the firm when he became involved with Mr. Kushner and described those first months as blissful. “It was a huge deal for me to be walking down the street holding someone’s hand,” he said.

He came out to his family by introducing them to Mr. Kushner. He said that they took it in stride. “His happiness is primary,” said his mother, Susan Barley.

Yet Mr. Kushner began having nagging doubts. “I just assumed that this really cute, outgoing guy had a history, just like everyone else in New York,” he said. “It was his first relationship, and I thought ‘I need to be really careful.’ ”

Also, Mr. Kushner added, there was “the Jewish issue.”

“I wanted marriage,” he said. “It seemed unfair to take marriage off the table.”

Toward the end of the year, Mr. Kushner ended things. “It was definitely unexpected,” Mr. Barley said. Mr. Kushner resolved to find a Jewish mate. “I got on JDate.com,” he said. “But it was horrific. As a whole, Jewish gay guys might be marvelous people, but the ones I met were insane.”

By summer 2008, Mr. Barley was interning again, this time with Rem Koolhaas’s firm in Rotterdam. Mr. Kushner flew there to visit him. “I realized he was what I wanted,” Mr. Kushner said. “He’s the one. We’d work it out.”

When Mr. Barley returned three months later, they signed up for a class at the 92nd Street Y for people interested in converting to Judaism, and Mr. Barley eventually did convert. Their careers moved forward. Mr. Barley graduated from Columbia and became a partner in a design and curatorial firm in New York. Mr. Kushner helped start a social networking site for architects called Architizer.

Mr. Kushner proposed at the Setai hotel in Miami during a Passover vacation with the Kushner family last year. He gave Mr. Barley a Rolex, which he returned because he wanted a Jaeger-LeCoultre.

“Even though we are both gay and nonstandard in that way, we were both raised feeling that marriage was something important and exciting,” Mr. Barley said. “I’d always liked the idea of marriage, but it wasn’t something I really pictured for myself. But then, it became a possibility, and that was kind of amazing.”

Mr. Kushner wanted the relationship his parents had. “There are two versions of my parents,” he said. “Growing up, me marrying a man would’ve been outside of the realm of possibilities. But by the time I proposed to Chris, they’d come around.”

During the December holidays, Mr. Barley and Mr. Kushner went to the home of Mr. Barley’s parents and took their own menorah to light.

“His parents are incredibly warm and welcoming,” Mr. Kushner said. “We just all sit and talk. And sometimes we sit and not talk! It’s amazing.”

Though both said the disparities in their families’ financial situations were not a concern, they did have a prenuptial agreement. “We’re not in denial that there are differences in our backgrounds, and a prenup was something that helped to neutralize that,” Mr. Kushner said. “The wedding was about a lot of things, but money wasn’t one of them.”

They were married on March 31 at the Four Seasons restaurant in New York. And it was Mr. Barley, the recent convert, who broke the glass at the end of the ceremony, which was led by Rabbi Samuel H. Weintraub.

The vows were recited under a wedding canopy designed by an architect friend of the couple. They plan to turn the fabric into a quilt. “Which is cool because quilts are a super Mennonite thing,” Mr. Barley said.

Added Mr. Kushner, “It’s always nice to have another blanket.”

I am looking to watch some good gay movies, so list your favorites

I really enjoyed Shelter and Is It Just Me, any other movies you'd recommend?

Hey everyone!

I wanted to share an experience with u all from today. I was chatting with my friend about Jillian Michaels this afternoon. My friend told me that she was obviously gay. I completely disagreed. From seeing her on TV, I thought she was obviously straight. What do you guys think? Do you think shes actually gay? EDIT: According to this website, she IS actually a lesbian! Apparently, she came out during an interview with Larry King. I'm pretty surprised, but happy for her

Matt

Sorry guys I deleted it. I shouldn't have posted it.

I'm not sure if this is the right section but this is a copy of the speech Dr. Mark Schuster gave the Children's Hospital Boston GLBT & Friends Celebration in June, 2010. I found it chilling, sobering, inspiring and hopeful. Thought some others might find it interesting as well. mile: It's too long for one post so enjoy two!

On Being Gay In Medicine: A Leading Harvard Pediatrician's Story

By Carey Goldberg

Quote:The first time I stood before a large audience to speak was when I was 13 years old. It was at my Bar Mitzvah. I walked up to the podium, looked out over the sea of faces, and thought to myself, I am a homosexual standing in front of all of these people. And I wondered what would happen if I told them.

That was in 1972, and even mentioning the word homosexual, unless paired with an expletive or derogatory adjective, would have been unacceptable at my synagogue. It would have been unacceptable in my home, my school, or any place I knew. I could not have conceived of telling my doctor. I assumed that I would never say out loud that I am a homosexual. The idea that I would someday be able to stand in an auditorium, stand anywhere, just a few miles from where I live with my husband, our two sons, and our dog, with everything but the white picket fence, was not something I could imagine.

Today I stand on a different stage. The Children's Hospital Boston GLBT and Friends group asked me to share my story as part of its celebration day. How I got here, what I learned along the way, especially at Children's, and how the world changed — these are what I will talk about.

A decade after I considered turning my Bar Mitzvah into a public confessional, I entered medical school at Harvard. Some students had started a gay group the year before. They had scoped out the territory, searched for role models, and come up nearly empty. In a creaky old closet, tucked way in the back, they found a world-renowned senior physician at Children's. He advised against starting the group, offering that it was much better to be secretive about being gay so that no one would bother you. I've heard that same advice many times from men and women from earlier generations who had fewer options in their day.

Around the same time, a Harvard physician I later met was just coming out. He was spotted at a social event with someone his hospital’s Chairman of the Board suspected was gay. The Chairman reported to the hospital that he thought the physician was gay too and said that people like that should not be allowed to work there. Fortunately, the CEO ignored the Chairman.

There was a junior faculty member at Beth Israel Hospital who was out and actually willing to talk with gay students. When I made my pilgrimage to meet her, even she advised me to remain closeted until after I got my first semester grades. She explained that the school would want to kick me out if they learned I was gay, and they could use poor grades as an excuse.

That's not to say that there was silence about gay people. We did learn about them in an elective course on “special” populations. One week we learned about prostitution; another, about drug addicts. In between, we learned about homosexuals. A real live one showed up to tell us what it was like. He was articulate and our own age and seemed just like all of us. Indeed, I knew him. We had gone to college together and he was a student at Harvard Law School. I sat in awe of his bravery and prayed no one had seen him say hi to me.

I came out to classmates I felt close to. They were mostly supportive. One time I was talking with a classmate about a guy who had asked me out on a date. She confessed that she had thought that being gay meant simply that men had sex with men; it had never occurred to her that they might actually go to a movie or fall in love. Her honesty gave me a window into what many peers believed, as I would learn repeatedly over the years when people let down their guard.

During medical school, I was on the admissions committee. Two people interviewed each applicant and then presented to the rest of the committee. There was an applicant who was outstanding in every category; I gave him a 10 out of 10. The other committee member who interviewed him, a doctor at Children's, gave him the worst score we'd seen. His record at one of the top schools in the country meant that he would have had to have confessed to murder, or worse, preferring Yale to Harvard, to get such a low score. We waited to hear the explanation. He said that he just didn't feel “comfortable” with the applicant.

The committee was baffled. I wasn't, because I had met the applicant. He was a man who was effeminate. I didn't know if he was gay, but I did know that he was someone who was likely to have been called names or to have been roughed up because people thought he was. The doctor who had interviewed him already had a reputation at Harvard College, where he helped premeds put together their applications for medical school. Gay students knew to avoid being assigned to him.

As it turned out, with no articulated explanation for the low score, the committee was unconvinced and went with my score. The applicant was admitted, got an MD/PhD, eventually came out as gay, and has gone on to do important work in transgender studies. I wasn't sorry that the doctor who had interviewed him left Children's before I began residency here.

A year later I was doing my rotations. On my adult neurology rotation, a young woman came to the emergency ward with urinary incontinence and other symptoms and signs of a herniated disc. The myelogram confirmed the diagnosis. The neurosurgeon was eager to operate. The neurology team was delighted that she was a great teaching case. But she proved a richer teaching case than we anticipated. The neurosurgeon abruptly canceled the operation. It turned out that the radiologist had reversed his reading.

When pressed as to why he no longer saw what even a third-year medical student could see (that would be me), he confessed that the neurosurgeon had pressured him to change his read. When our team met with the neurosurgeon, he was direct. He had seen what he assumed to be a lesbian novel at the patient's bedside, and he wasn't going to operate. His rationalization was that she might have inserted something into her urethra that caused her incontinence. He had no research or case studies to support his theory. He had no explanation for why a lesbian would do this. He had no explanation for why it wasn't showing up on x-ray. He made it clear, though, that he wasn't going to operate on a lesbian.

Then I heard a voice shout, “So, she's a lesbian, what does it matter!” And then I realized that the voice was mine. There was a moment of silence as everyone turned to look at me, jaws agape. The neurosurgeon burst forth with questions. How do you know? Did she tell you? What did she say? Indeed, she hadn't said anything. It was just that she and the woman by her side during all of this were the most obviously devoted couple I'd met in any of my rotations yet. The neurosurgeon held firm. To their credit, the neurology team got orthopedics to perform the surgery.

On another rotation, I was on a consult service that helped diagnose a man with AIDS. His case hit home. He had just moved across the country with his boyfriend, who was a first-year Harvard medical student. The pulmonary fellow on our team, a generally kind man, grumbled to me that he hated having to go into this patient's room. And so we didn't go in much. The patient's intern also avoided him, even managing to find herself too busy to perform a timed blood draw one night for a key lab test. I was still there writing my consult note, so after several attempts to gently remind her to take a break from having a light evening and chatting with staff, I just did it myself. This patient was not unlike any number of patients at hospitals around the country, wondering why the clinicians who were supposed to provide care and comfort appeared to be avoiding and even judging them.

He eventually died. His surviving boyfriend, the medical student, joined some other medical students and me at the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. While there, our visit to the AIDS quilt, a collection of panels that each represented someone who had been lost, was particularly poignant as we remembered my former patient and so many other patients and friends.

Later, during residency, we had a child in the neonatal intensive care unit with two moms. The primary nurse assigned to him was incoherent on rounds. She couldn't contain her distaste for the boy's parents. She didn't want either mom around, including the one who had given birth. The charge nurse pulled her off the case. This was the same neonatal intensive care unit in which staff also found it hilarious that a female utilization review administrator used to be a man; they snickered and whispered within earshot when she was there. I encountered the same infant again a few months later on the wards when he was admitted with bronchiolitis. There the nurses and physicians treated the moms with all the respect that every parent should receive.

After my third year, I entered a joint masters program at the Kennedy School of Government. Having benefited from the peer support of the medical school gay group, I teamed up with some other students to start one at the Kennedy School. We organized a public screening of a documentary about the life of Harvey Milk, an early gay rights leader who was assassinated. I agreed to do the introductory speech for the evening. When I mentioned this to my boyfriend, a junior faculty member at the law school who was concerned about getting tenure, he told me that word would certainly get back to the medical school and I would not get a residency. That gave me pause. He also told me he would have to break up with me because he wouldn't be able to be seen with me once I came out publicly.

That was eye-opening in so many ways, and basically guaranteed that I would go ahead and introduce the evening. We had tried to meet with the dean to invite him to make some remarks at the event, but he wouldn't even talk with us. Through his assistant, he declined to attend the event, but he did send a letter for us to read. It talked about the joys of running for public office. It mentioned nothing about being gay or our new student group. His letter became an object lesson for the school, with the audience laughing vigorously at the words so carefully chosen to avoid giving any hint of support for our group.

A few months later it was time for me to pick medical school rotations for the summer, so I met with my attending from my pediatrics rotation at Children's, who was also a member of the admissions committee for the pediatrics residency. He had decided that he should be my advisor. He told me that I was definitely going to get into Children's for residency so I should take the opportunity to do adult rotations because I'd get plenty of pediatrics for the rest of my career. He told me who should write my recommendations, with him being at the top of his list. At the end of our conversation, I told him I had one more thing I wanted to talk about. I told him I was gay.

I felt I had to. He was inquisitive about his advisees' personal lives, often asking us who each other was dating, and I didn't want him to hear from someone else and think I didn't trust him. Plus, my most important example of leadership, which was presumably something that residencies looked at, involved the Kennedy School gay group. He looked stunned. He said nothing for a long time. Then he asked if I had told anyone else at the hospital. I said that I hadn't, and he told me not to tell anybody. I left, not sure of what to make of our meeting.

After the summer, I came back to meet with him to finalize my residency applications. The only new grade that had come in at that point was an A+ on my end-of-the-first-year masters project. I went back over my list of recommenders because I thought I should add an attending from the summer. That's when he informed me that he would not be writing me a recommendation. This time I was the one who was stunned. I hadn't seen it coming. It wasn't lost on me that without a letter from the attending of my only pediatric rotation, I wouldn't be able to become a pediatrician. That boyfriend who had told me that word would get back to the medical school and keep me from getting a residency was right. What he hadn't anticipated was that I would be the messenger.

I've been following this case since it began and it is just so sad.

Here read this article first ; Trayvon .

Read it?

Well theres a lot more than what they have there, but as long as you get the gist. It's tragic that someone, who's only a year younger then me can be killed so easily.

I personally believe it has alot to do with racial profiling or racism in general, but I'm not in the man's mind who shot him, so I don't know. But I would think that someone of Hispanic descent would understand what racial profiling is and wouldn't have done what he did to Trayvon, because for years the Black and Hispanic communities have been equally discriminated against.

It's really a sad situation.

Have you guys heard about this? I would imagine the Americans have.

It's particularly hard on quite a lot of black people, because of history. I'm half black, but I still sympathize and empathize, not to mention he looks similar to my brother who's the second oldest.


(R.I.P :frown: Trayvon)

What do you guys think about this?

How does one go about getting justice when their bullied child commits suicide?

It just seems unfair and a little like a cash grab to sue education departments to somehow validate that something is wrong, shouldn't we have bullycide laws?

The family in the story below are devestated at the loss of their son and brother who was bullied at 2 schools that were 700km's apart, and he commit suicide because of the bullying.

Should this not come under laws of involuntary manslaughter?

Should we start holding the bullies to task?

Should we start prosecution those in the position of responsibility who stand by and valid the bullying by not acting?

I say sue the bastards until they start getting the message

Alex Wildman's family to receive payout

Hey guys,

I was wondering if any of you had seen this story about a teacher in the U.S who got dismissed for having a past history in doing gay porn.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-...ds-newsxml

Personally I think he was unfairly dismissed as his 'past work' was indeed in the past and he was making a good career for himself as a teacher. I am really pleased that he can return back to the classroom as I think as long as he is good at his job why should anyone batter an eyelid? I know some people may disapprove of his past but are we as a society too judgemental as everyone can have a history. Personally I support this gentleman in all of his endeavours and hope he has a fulfilling career in the classroom. mile:

So what do you guys think?