from Huffington Post
George Clooney On Gay Marriage: Final Leg Of The Civil Rights Movement
First Posted: 1/13/12 01:41 PM ET Updated: 1/13/12 02:06 PM ET
A long time supporter of marriage equality, George Clooney said on Thursday that he believes its conservative opposition is facing an inevitable decline.
"I think the world is changing and it's becoming less and less of an issue and I think it shouldn't be long now," Clooney told E! Online at the Critics' Choice Awards. "I think younger people are looking at this like, 'Who cares?'"
As his good friend Viola Davis won the CCA for Best Actress for her role in racial drama "The Help," Clooney linked that struggle with the current effort to legalize gay marriage.
"I do believe it's generational, much like the civil rights movement," the star, who picked up Best Actor at the CCAs, said. "Young people started taking to the streets and things changed. This really is the final leg of the civil rights movement."
In December, Clooney signed on to star in the LA staging of the play "Prop 8." Written by Dustin Lance Black, it is a courtroom reenactment of the courtroom drama behind the federal trial that overturned the Proposition 8 gay marriage ban in California. He told E! that he will be playing lawyer David Boies, who along with Ted Olsen, sued on behalf of gay marriage advocates.
"It is astonishing that gay and lesbian Americans are still treated as second-class citizens," Clooney said in a statement announcing his casting. "I am confident that, very soon, the laws of this nation will reflect the basic truth that gay and lesbian people -- like all human beings -- are born equal in dignity and rights."
Schmekel, The Transgendered Jew Punk Band
THE basement auditorium of the Jewish Community Center on the Upper West Side is a sincere space. Big, brown and bare, it suggests a school gym, a place for officially sanctioned fun — which made a recent concert by Schmekel, a raucous klezmer-core punk band made up of “100% trans Jews,” all the more surprising.
Jodi Picoult’s son comes out as she writes new novel about gay rights
"I actually started writing about this because it was so upsetting to me personally that gay rights is even an issue in this country," Picoult said at an event for her book in New York Monday night. "I travel enough to know that it just isn't an issue anywhere else. And they wonder why Americans are so hung up on it. I have so many gay friends and I've known so many gay people over the years. I have gay relatives."
And one of those relatives is her own son, Kyle, who's 19.
You can buy the book on Amazon here
Our member S. Stanley Gordon has published his memoir
My Two Wives and Three Husbands is now available at Amazon.com
This memoir is the story of my search for love: first in the straight world and then in the gay world, including my show-biz adventures as a theatrical producer in New York and London.
To demonstrate the tone of my ode to love, here are two excerpts from my preface:
Mae West , that icon of sexual liberty, gave me a line that I have used whenever people mention that I look younger than my eighty-some years and ask "What's your secret?" I think of Mae as I reply "I owe it all to dirty living!
A word of caution, however. If concepts like Hopeless Romantic, Love at First Sight, or Head Over Heels make you nauseous, this book is definitely not for you. But if you have a zest for life's adventures and intrinsically understand that such cliche's are never to be sneered at, then you're in for some wonderful fun, a few tears and, hopefully some meaningful new insights.
At $16.95, I can assure you of at least an entertaining read and I think a lot more. Enjoy!
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0982998783
Dan Savage gets MTV Pilot
According to Entertainment Weekly, Savage Love may be coming to MTV.
Columnist Dan Savage is working on an advice show for the network.
MTV has ordered a pilot that follows Savage as he tours college campuses giving his brand of brutally honest (and sometimes graphic) sex and relationship advice. In the format, Savage takes questions from an auditorium audience (similar to his recently completed college tour).
Savage’s advice column Savage Love is long known to readers of The Onion’s AV Club, and he’s currently the editorial director of Seattle’s alt weekly The Stranger. Last year, MTV covered Savage’s “It Gets Better Project,” where gay and straight adults submitted videos assuring teens struggling with sexual orientation issues that their lives will eventually improve. The openly gay columnist has also clashed with right-wingers, particularly over rights issues (in a Newsweek Q&A alongside Jane Lynch, he recently declared gays have won the culture war).
James Franco: ‘Maybe I’m Just Gay’
James Franco addresses the constant questions about his sexuality, and the reason he chooses so many gay roles, in the current issue of Entertainment Weekly:
"It’s funny because the way that kind of stuff is talked about on blogs is so black-and-white...It’s all cut-and-dry identity politics. 'Is he straight or is he gay?' Or, 'This is your third gay movie — come out already!' And all based on, gay or straight, based on the idea that your object of affection decides your sexuality...
...There are lots of other reasons to be interested in gay characters than wanting myself to go out and have sex with guys. And there are also lots of other aspects about these characters that I’m interested in, in addition to their sexuality. So, in some ways it’s coincidental, in other ways it’s not. I mean, I’ve played a gay man who’s living in the ’60s and ’70s, a gay man who we depicted in the ‘50s, and one being in the ‘20s. And those were all periods when to be gay, at least being gay in public, was much more difficult. Part of what I’m interested in is how these people who were living anti-normative lifestyles contended with opposition. Or, you know what, maybe I’m just gay."