John Barrowman Bares Some Below-The-Belt Skin In New NOH8 Campaign Picture (PHOTO).|Huffington Post Gay Voices
John Barrowman shows his ass. For a good cause, of course!
No one does bloody cheek like Barrowman. The video below is a perhaps unexpected eloquent case for marriage equality. It’s snarky and campy and deeply human and touching, just like the man himself.
How “Husbands” Predicted The Future For Gay Marriage And Digital Hollywood.
Fortunately, Husbands has not had to worry about suffering from performance issues. When Bell and Espenson launched it two years ago as a web series on YouTube, it won a rave from no less than The New Yorker, and generated enough of a passionate fan base that the duo was able to raise $60,000 on Kickstarter for a second season. That season, which debuted on YouTube last year, saw a roughly 35% boost in viewership. “Everybody has access to the ability to make their own product now,” says Espenson. “It really is ‘the best will thrive.’ Like, whole networks are set up to guess what people are going to like. You don’t have to guess anymore. You can put it up and see what they like. That’s what we did. And they liked us.”
Excellent article and interview with Bell, Espenson and Hemeon about the impact of Husbands and finding new venues for content.
Husbands’ co-star Sean Hemeon is flanked by series co-creators Brad Bell and Jane Espenson at the 2013 Entertainment Weekly San Diego Comic Con party. The much-lauded marriage equality series centers on Hemeon and Bell, who play a hilarious mismatched married couple in the crisply written show. | Image: Chelsea Lauren/WireImage.
It’s very interesting to me that the trio no longer use the phrase “Web series” to describe the show, now beginning its third season (and this time on CW Seed, the companion site to the broadcast network), but rather simply call it a “series.”
I think they are right — and it’s very interesting to see language and usage change — sometimes practically overnight.
Says Espenson: “There’s nothing on YouTube that you can’t see on your smart TV. There’s nothing on TV, essentially, that you can’t find online in some form. So [saying “Web series” is] like saying, “I heard a radio song” vs. “a CD song!” Well, what’s the difference? You can get it either place.
I’ll have to start checking myself.
Meanwhile, you can watch — please do; it’s terrific!! — the new season of Husbands on CW Seed.
Watch the first two seasons and some behind-the-scenes videos HERE.
Read some of the Husbands-related posts I’ve made over the last year HERE, HERE, and HERE.
‘Skyfall’ Actor Ben Whishaw Officially Comes Out As Gay, Reveals He Is Married.
In a statement obtained by the Daily Mail over the weekend, Whishaw’s rep confirmed the actor is gay and has been married to his partner, Australian composer Mark Bradshaw, for a year now.
“Ben has never hidden his sexuality, but like many actors he prefers not to discuss his family or life outside of his work,” his spokesman said Friday night. “Due to speculation, I can confirm that Ben and Mark entered into a civil partnership in August 2012. They were proud to do so and are very happy.”
Ben Whishaw as Freddie Lyon in “The Hour,” the period drama from the BBC about newsgathering in the 1950s. The Beeb cancelled the show after two series, sadly, but it was great TV. For many in the U.S., “The Hour” was the first real introduction to Whishaw’s many talents. | Image: BBC
There’s part of me that’s happy about this. There’s another part of me that just thinks it’s not a big deal and, frankly, none of my business or anyone else’s.
I’m conflicted, I suppose. I believe that it is so very important for LGBT equality that people realize how many people live their lives vibrantly and openly and how that polyglot makes this a richer world.
But ….
I don’t know if I really need to know who Ben Whishaw sleeps with or is married to. It just has no relevance. He’s a fine, fine actor. He was great in the last James Bond flick, picking up the mantle of “Q” seamlessly from John Cleese and the magnificent Desmond Llewellyn. He was mesmerizing as Freddie Lyon in two seasons of the BBC drama “The Hour” and he was captivating as Sebastian Flyte in a less-than-stellar take on Evelyn Waugh’s “Brideshead Revisited.”
Is he less or more captivating because we know that the performer under the artifice is gay? My belief is that if he’s a fine actor, everything — everything — else is completely irrelevant.
Well, anyway, good on ya, Ben. I wish you, your husband, and your fabulous head of hair all the happiness in the world!
“There’s a misconception that we have now achieved everything but marriage equality, and that’s just not the case. We still don’t have societal equality,” Milk said. “You can ask any African American, any Latino, if they were not treated equally somewhere along the line. Whenever you have a group that can be marginalized, you have to be vigilant in protecting those rights. Equality requires constant vigilance and it doesn’t end with same-sex marriage.
“We can legalize all day long, but we need to change the conversation,” Milk added. “For so long we’ve taught the message of tolerance. But tolerance is such a low bar. Who really wants to be tolerated? As I always say, we need to celebrate diversity, not just tolerate it.”
via Stuart Milk On LGBT Rights: ‘We Still Have A Long Way To Go’|Huffington Post
I agree. Then again, tolerance is something. By and large, we are edging away from tolerance and into general acceptance, but it’s a progession. It’s immensely frustrating to be sure, but it’s happening. And, actually, it’s happening on an astonishing pace, not only in the U.S. but throughout the developed world.
Unfortunately, it remains important that Stuart Milk must prompt us to remember that the pleas of his uncle, Harvey, for gay people to come out, to stand out, to be proud, and to serve as models are still extremely important to our daily lives. But, thus far, we’ve been so successful in changing minds and opinions, we can have a day where this picture is (rightly) celebrated!
Tenacious LGBT heroine Edith Windsor, 84, took her fight against DOMA to the Supreme Court of the United States and won. Here she is holding a fan bearing her image at the New York City gay pride parade just days after her June 26, 2013 victory. | Craig Ruttle/AP Photo
As ever, Sullivan is the eloquent voice on this issue.
[Re-posted from earlier today]
Some final thoughts after so many years of so many thoughts. Marriage is not a political act; it’s a human one. It is based on love, before it is rooted in law. Same-sex marriages have always existed because the human heart has always existed in complicated, beautiful and strange ways. But to have them recognized by the wider community, protected from vengeful relatives, preserved in times of illness and death, and elevated as a responsible, adult and equal contribution to our common good is a huge moment in human consciousness. It has happened elsewhere. But here in America, the debate was the most profound, lengthy and impassioned. This country’s democratic institutions made this a tough road but thereby also gave us the chance and time to persuade the country, which we did. I understand and respect those who in good conscience fought this tooth and nail…
View original post 259 more words
I applaud the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act. This was discrimination enshrined in law. It treated loving, committed gay and lesbian couples as a separate and lesser class of people. The Supreme Court has righted that wrong, and our country is better off for it. We are a people who declared that we are all created equal – and the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.
That’s from the President. I’m not sure if anyone could say it better or more succinctly.
This is, in fact, a great day for America. It is a day that opens up hope to those of us for too long have had none. It is a day that means that we are on a course to make good a promise more than 200 years old that everyone — no matter their religion, the color of their skin, their sexuality — is equal under the law in the United States of America.
It means that for the first time, bi-national couples will not have to choose to give up their country for the person that they love. It means that for the first time, I can have the same 1,100 Federal benefits of marriage that straight couples have always had and taken for granted. It means that the Federal government — my Federal government — will recognize my partnership in the same way that it has always recognized straight couples in a marriage contract. And it means, for the very first time in my 49 years of life, that my government does not look upon this taxpayer as a second class citizen unworthy of the same benefits and privileges of that citizenship as my fellow straight citizens.
For someone who has always been fascinated by the workings of government, who read our founding documents and studied the writings of our founding fathers and who loved political debates in civics, I’ve often been gobsmacked by the infiltration of the radical right into the political process in recent decades and their righteous indignation when something does not go their way. The continual attempts by the radical right and the “Christian right” to undermine our system with the perverse rewriting of history in which the United States was built on some sketchy moralistic Christian platform is to pervert the very form of government that they claim to uphold.
The decisions in Perry (Prop 8) and Windsor (DOMA) come 10 years to the day after the Supreme Court decision in Lawrence v. Texas, perhaps the first significant Libertarian victory of the 21st century, and means that June 26th will be a day celebrated by lovers of equality for many years to come.
The curious thing about history is that good and bad, correct and incorrect, important and inane all come about from such curious places. DOMA and “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” were, for gay and lesbian Americans, two of the most unjust and inhumane pieces of legislation created in our lifetime. And they were signed by President Clinton. The Lawrence case was decided by the G.W. Bush-era Rehnquist Court, while today’s two decisions in an Obama-era Roberts Court, showed the conservative Chief Justice writing the opinion in Perry and dissenting in Windsor.
“The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. By seeking to displace this protection and treating those persons as living in marriages less respected than others,the federal statute is in violation of the Fifth Amendment. ” from the opinion in United States v. Windsor
Meanwhile, the Court’s longest-serving justice, that unrepentant lion of the right, 77-year-old Antonin Scalia, who dissented in Lawrence, joined Roberts in affirming the Perry had no standing while delivering a resounding (some may say deranged) 26-page dissent in Windsor.
What does all that mean? It means that in all ways and in all cases, justice served makes for strange bedfellows.
I’ll leave you with Dan Savage’s brilliant — and utterly and completely true — admonition that in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, you can always count on the freedom and the bravery coming last. And while I fervently believe that, I am also unfailingly glad that in America we do usually get there in the end.
Fight on. I have a wedding to plan.
Supreme Court Rulings Loom On Affirmative Action, Gay Marriage, Voting Rights.
SCOTUS – Image: Wikimedia Commons
The gay media world is all a-twitter over when the DOMA and Prop. 8 rulings are going to be handed down. There’s not a lot of time left, either. One suspects that the Supremes are going to issue these opinions on the very last day of the term — which will be June 27 — and run for the door until the first Monday until October because, I don’t know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a timeshare in the Berkshires?
In numerology, 11 is one of those ‘magic numbers.’ There’s some serious partying happening in Rehoboth Beach tonight!
Image: AFER
Image: glaad.org
Rhode Island Legalizes Gay Marriage.|Huffington Post
Rhode Island became the tenth U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage Thursday with a 56-15 vote.
Just before he signed the legislation into law, Gov. Lincoln Chafee took to the steps of the Rhode Island State House, where he told a jubilant crowd, “Today we are making history … we are living up to the ideals of our founder.”
He went on to note, “When your belief and heart is in something, it’s easy work. I am proud to say that now, at long last, you are free to marry the person you love.”
By the way, the official name of the smallest state in the Union is the longest: the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. The state bird is a chicken: the Rhode Island Red hen, and the state drink is “Coffee Milk,” which, I believe, is something like a coffee flavored milkshake.
The state motto is “Hope.” We hope that the next 4/5ths of the United States will follow Little Rhody’s lead down the trail of equality.
Equality advocate Chris Kluwe of the Minnesota Vikings. Photo: Getty/Huffington Post.
Chris Kluwe, Minnesota Vikings Punter, Defends Gay Athletes In CNN Editorial.
Chris Kluwe is the best! He’s passionate and he just gets it. Also, he defies — utterly and completely — the stereotype of the dumb, uninformed jock. Which, in this case, I think, is perfect, since he’s all about breaking down stereotypes for others.
Like Brendon Ayanbadejo of my hometown Baltimore Ravens, Kluwe makes me want to root for the Minnesota Vikings simply because he’s on the team. Maybe I’ll pull for both teams this year!
One Last Word 