SOIN - Live Issues

Partway Gay?
For Some Teen Girls, Sexual Preference Is A Shifting Concept

By Laura Sessions Stepp, Washington Post Staff Writer

Move over, Ellen DeGeneres, and make way for the younger girls. Way younger, actually, and way different from what most people think of as lesbians.

You can see this new trend on Friday nights outside Union Station, sweethearts from high schools around the Washington area, some locking lips, others hanging out in their tight blue jeans and puffy winter parkas, talking on their cell phones.

You can see them in the hallways of high schools like South Lakes in Reston, Magruder in Rockville or Coolidge in the District. In 2002 at Coolidge, a teacher got so fed up with girls nuzzling each other in class and other public places that he threatened to send any he saw to the principal's office. He admitted to students that he wouldn't report boy-girl kisses, setting off a furor among a student body that, the year before, had chosen a lesbian pair as the school's cutest couple.

These girls pack Ani DiFranco concerts and know tATu lyrics by heart. Their attention is usually directed exclusively at each other but not always: A group of girls at a private school in Northwest Washington charge boys $10 to watch the girls make out in front of them. At one school dance earlier last year, a chaperon had to break up a group of guys circled around two girls kissing, according to other girls who were there.

Maybe the teenage exhibitionists were just yanking guys' chains, or hoping to prove how sexy they are, or copying Britney and Madonna. But it's also possible they were enjoying themselves. There's no way for an outsider to know, for in the protean world of young female sexuality, where all forms of expression are modeled, nothing is certain.

Social scientists say that 5 percent to 7 percent of young people are gay or lesbian, and that teenagers are starting at younger ages to have same-sex sexual experiences: 13 for boys, 15 for girls.

But those figures don't begin to tell the full story about today's girls because girls, more often than boys, experiment with their sexuality and resist being placed in any particular group.

Chanda Harris, a junior at High Road Upper School in Beltsville, is one of these girls. She's standing outside Union Station on a cold Friday night, waiting for her girlfriend and holding three giant helium balloons in celebration of her friend's birthday.

The girls around her from various high schools – Bladensburg in Maryland, Anacostia, Ballou, Cardozo and Coolidge in the District – converge to hear what she has to say.

She started going out with girls when she was 14, following a breakup with her boyfriend.

"At first I thought going out with a girl was nasty," she says. "Then I went to a club and did a big flip-flop. I've been off and on with girls and guys since then."

Another girl, a junior at Anacostia High, says her first love was a guy now in the Marines and stationed in North Carolina. She dated Kenny for two years and his picture adorns her bedroom wall.

Click here for the full-length story

[back to the top]

Marriage-conscious society mostly frowns, but homosexuals are finding a club here and a movie there that accepts them. It's a 'sea change,' says one.

NEW DELHI - Under purple strobe lights, a man in a sleeveless T-shirt with "Daddy" on the front slow-dances with a long-haired guy in a tight seersucker blouse. At the bar, a slender man in a tie-dyed shirt whispers into the ear of his muscular friend, who wears iridescent green sunglasses despite the darkness of the room.

In shadowy corners, under the stairs and behind the half-open door of the women's bathroom, men embrace, taking advantage of the relative safety of the Indian capital's only gay nightclub to meet and flirt.

Others, unable to forget the stigma attached to homosexuality in India, sit alone at tables, eyeing the men on the dance floor with a mixture of admiration and anxiety.

"If my family knew I was here, they'd kill me," said Samir Agarwal, a 25-year-old businessman who attended the weekly gay night at Pegs N' Pints, a New Delhi club, recently. "In India, if a family knows their child is gay, it creates a big chaos. Gays and lesbians are not acceptable. It's a matter of shame, a matter of embarrassment."

In traditional India, where marriage is life's most important event and no family is complete without children and grandchildren, homosexuality is rarely acknowledged, let alone accepted. But increasingly, gay Indians are meeting in Internet chat rooms, organizing marches, hosting parties and showing up at support groups, generating a wave of activism that is bringing the gay community into public view.

"It's been like a sea change," said Shaan Thadhani, 25, a fashion designer who returned to India recently after several years in Britain and attended the gay dance session at Pegs N' Pints, which is a bar catering to heterosexuals six nights a week and a gay club only on Tuesdays. "Before I went to London, we never had this. We had one support group. The scene here is very new."

In the last year, the Bombay-based Indian film industry, known as Bollywood, has released several movies featuring gay characters, including "Mango Souffle" in which two male characters skinny dip in a pool.

"The Boyfriend," a novel published this year by Indian college professor and gay activist R. Raj Rao, offers what may be the most detailed account yet of gay life in Bombay, exploring the relationship between a journalist and his lover, who is an untouchable, a member of India's lowest caste.

With all due respect to Bravo's 'Fab Five,' heterosexual guys aren't the only ones who could use a little making over. Meet Blaine Barker, a gay man who was game for getting his fashion sense set straight.

Gay, shmay. I've just about had it up to here. Hollywood, the church, prime time, even The Times-Picayune wedding announcements:

Everything says gay is cool, gay is hip, gay is so positively IN. Even Britney tried it out on the MTV Video Music Awards.

But I'm here to make a stand. I'm here to tell you that straight can be cool, too. Someone needs to stand up for beer bellies, Old Spice, Jimmy Kimmel and the great American breakfast of convenience-store hot dogs and coffee.

I'm hetero and proud of it. You offer me Will or Grace and I say: Give me Grace, dammit! I refuse to accept the premise that heterosexuals are passé. Just because I don't know the difference between Botox and sweat socks, don't know Prada from Pringles, doesn't mean I don't possess the Fabulous Gene. And, unlike your average beer swilling Joe, I'm willing to do something about it.

My project is called Straight Eye for the Queer Guy, wherein we administer a little redneck rock, Budweiser, wings at Hooters and Monday Night Football to put a little butch back into an impossibly toned, Abercrombie & Fitch-clad, simply ab-fab Bourbon Street boy's life.

A guy named Blaine Barker says to me on the phone, "I was just telling my friends the other day: There ought to be a 'Straight Eye for the Queer Guy.' I mean, I know some men who can't even change a tire!"

"Agreed," I told Barker. "It's a project worthy of much effort. And we're going to start with you."

I had checked his qualifications: He told me he last kissed a girl at his junior prom. That's not very gay, I thought. The next year, he took a boy to his senior prom. That's pretty gay.

When he told me he lettered in sports, I thought: That's not very gay. When he told me it was hockey, I thought: Well, at least he was wearing skates.

He works at a gay bar (Bourbon Pub), writes for a gay magazine (Hot Spots) and he can't name any special teams players on the Saints. And he signs his e-mails: "*Hugs." Gay enough for me.

For the project, I assembled the Flab Five. They're five soft-bellied guys I know mostly from softball and drinking. (Actually, one of them I met through my work in the theater, but I don't want to give you the wrong impression.)

Rosie O'Donnell has been described as newly outspoken and aggressive since she came out. The change in her public personality may have been a result of her being post-talk show and post-magazine; she no longer has to depend on advertisers. The change in her inner life, she says, has been a result of her decision to come out.

Accepting the Vito Russo Award from GLAAD - the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation - in New York this week, O'Donnell said friends had told her that coming out "would change my life." "But I never thought when they were telling me - whether it was Ellen or Nathan or Harvey or any of my friends who are out - I never thought for a moment what it would change in my own life.

"I always thought it would be about the public perception, the adjective assigned to your name for eternity: 'lesbian Rosie O'Donnell, lesbian Rosie O'Donnell.' It's like 'Aries Rosie O'Donnell' or 'size-10-shoe Rosie O'Donnell.' What I didn't realize was that it would change everything about my life. And for the first time, I'm really, really, really happy."

Cornerstone Theatre's 'Body of Faith,' part of an L.A. series, examines the role spirituality plays in the lives of everyday gays.

The first story in "Body of Faith," Cornerstone Theater's exploration of spirituality in the gay community, is about a boy who is assigned to look up a word in a school dictionary. While hunting for it, he happens upon a nearby listing for "homosexual" and is happy to discover that there's a word for people like him.

When he shows the word to his teacher, however, she does not share his excitement. Neither does the principal, nor his mother. During a later visit to the dictionary, he finds that his word has been blotted out.

"Body of Faith" goes on to relate the stories of gay people who've been treated the same way by religion. When not ignored outright, they've had select quotations from religious texts flung at them in condemnation. Often, they end up feeling that their sexuality is incompatible with spirituality.

So you want to escape to the Caribbean with your sweetie or your pals. A week sunning in soft sand and body-surfing the warm, cerulean waves equals one week less spent shoveling snow and fending off frostbite, no?

Three winters ago (another tough one), my love and I looked up a travel agent in Harvard Square to book a package deal. Trying to sell us five nights on Grenada, she asked, ''Is this a mother-daughter trip?'' (My girlfriend and I are four years apart.)

It wasn't until the late 1980s that an openly gay character appeared in mainstream comics, when writer John Byrne introduced lesbian Captain Maggie Sawyer to the Metropolis Police Department – and readers of the "Superman" titles.

"Gay characters in comics have been few and far between," said Martin King, co-owner of Showcase Comics on South Street.

And it wasn't until 1992 that the first hero came out of the closet: Northstar, in "Alpha Flight" No. 106.

Marvel Comics will continue to push the envelope of comic book story lines and reach out to new readers with the arrival Wednesday of its reinterpretation of the classic Western series "Rawhide Kid."

A loner in the Old West, Rawhide Kid is a skilled fighter – one of the most feared and respected enforcers of the time. He also happens to be gay, and it is this revelation that has created a firestorm of controversy that caught even Marvel by surprise.

"We didn't put much energy into this at all," said series editor Axel Alonso of the publicity the book has received. "Who could expect that a little Western could have this amount of impact?"

Paul Reubens is no stranger to the sex police. In 1991, he was busted in a Sarasota porn theater and charged with the ultimate victimless crime: whacking off during a showing of Nancy Nurse. Reubens pleaded no contest, and the case became a tabloid sensation. "I was leading the news," he later told Vanity Fair, "followed by Dahmer eating people, boring holes into their heads, and turning them into zombies."

While the US lost one lesbian daytime talk show host in 2002, television viewers can look forward to another taking her place this year.

NBC announced on Tuesday it had picked up "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," an hour-long syndicated talk show that will air five days a week, in all 14 NBC-owned and -operated stations in 30 percent of the country.

Drag queens join gay guerrilla partygoers as they take over straight bars for the evening

You know the party's a success when a towering, raven-haired drag queen tames a mechanical bull long enough for cameras to capture her pose.

This was the scene at The Grizzly Rose one Saturday in November, when same-sex dance partners overwhelmed the traditional two-step crowd, and clean-cut pretty boys outnumbered the club's regulars - rough-knuckled cowboys.

Loud became America's first gay icon on TV and arguably its first "reality" star.

Lance Loud was deteriorating in a Southern California hospice when he glanced at a photo of himself from "An American Family," the landmark 1973 documentary miniseries.

In December 2001, Loud left the world in the same way he burst onto the world's stage: with the TV cameras rolling. But he was not the same guy.

This month, Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin was honored at "A Cracked X-Mas 5," Hollywood's fifth annual comedy benefit for The Trevor Helpline, a national crisis number for gay youth. But while gay friendly stand-ups including Anthony Clark (Yes, Dear) got yuks on stage, the best laughs were outside on the red carpet!

Showtime, which has garnered attention and some of its highest ratings with the gay-themed serial "Queer as Folk," has ordered a dramatic program dealing with the lesbian community in Los Angeles, tentatively titled "Earthlings," to premiere next summer.

Jennifer Beals ("Flashdance"), Pam Grier ("Jackie Brown") and "24's" Mia Kirshner are part of the ensemble cast.

Showtime's parent company, Viacom, has been exploring the possibility of launching a gay cable network. Reruns of "Queer as Folk" (which will begin its third season next year) and the new series are both seen as potential programming for the new channel.

Television: In spite of the sharp decline on scripted series, due to the cancellation of several notable shows, activists see increasing acceptance.

Steve Martin gazed out at the Hollywood crowd as he hosted last year's Oscars and tried to surmise what the vast television audience must be thinking: "They're all gay," he said.

Yet for all the jokes about the entertainment industry embracing - or, in the eyes of religious conservatives, promoting - the cause of gays and lesbians, this year's prime-time lineup will actually witness a sharp decline in the number of regular or recurring gay, lesbian and transgender characters.

According to data compiled by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, the major TV networks featured 20 such characters in prime time last season, scattered across 16 series - including since-canceled "The Ellen Show," starring Ellen DeGeneres; and "The Education of Max Bickford," with actress Helen Shaver playing a man who became a woman.


	For Some Teen Girls, Sexual Preference Is A Shifting Concept Washington Post, January 4, 2003 India's gays see small improvement in cultural outlets Chicago Tribune, December 10, 2003 Straight Eye for the Queer Guy The Times-Picayune, October 12, 2003 Rosie's glad she did it San Francisco Chronicle, April 18, 2003 Theater Review: When soul and sexuality meet Los Angeles Times, March 5, 2003 Different isles, different attitudes toward gay travelers Boston Globe, February 23, 2003 Gays in comics: A brief history Philadelphia Daily News, February 4, 2003 "Out" in the Old West, Marvel Comics reintroduces Rawhide Kid – and he's gay Philadelphia Daily News, February 4, 2003 Persecuting Pee-wee Village Voice, January 15-21, 2003 NBC Picks Up Ellen DeGeneres Talk Show Gay.com (U.K.), January 10, 2003 Drag queens join gay guerrilla partygoers as they take over straight bars for the evening Denver Post, January 7, 2003 Documentary on PBS revisits Lance Loud in his 'twilight' Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2003 Billy Campbell's Night "Out" T.V. Guide, December 24, 2002 Showtime plans a lesbian series Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2002 Number of Gay TV Characters Plummets Los Angeles Times September 16, 2002 Suggest examples of coverage to raarons@aol.com Please include all necessary links in your e-mail.				Washington Post, January 4, 2003 Partway Gay? For Some Teen Girls, Sexual Preference Is A Shifting Concept By Laura Sessions Stepp, Washington Post Staff Writer Move over, Ellen DeGeneres, and make way for the younger girls. Way younger, actually, and way different from what most people think of as lesbians. You can see this new trend on Friday nights outside Union Station, sweethearts from high schools around the Washington area, some locking lips, others hanging out in their tight blue jeans and puffy winter parkas, talking on their cell phones. You can see them in the hallways of high schools like South Lakes in Reston, Magruder in Rockville or Coolidge in the District. In 2002 at Coolidge, a teacher got so fed up with girls nuzzling each other in class and other public places that he threatened to send any he saw to the principal's office. He admitted to students that he wouldn't report boy-girl kisses, setting off a furor among a student body that, the year before, had chosen a lesbian pair as the school's cutest couple. These girls pack Ani DiFranco concerts and know tATu lyrics by heart. Their attention is usually directed exclusively at each other but not always: A group of girls at a private school in Northwest Washington charge boys $10 to watch the girls make out in front of them. At one school dance earlier last year, a chaperon had to break up a group of guys circled around two girls kissing, according to other girls who were there. Maybe the teenage exhibitionists were just yanking guys' chains, or hoping to prove how sexy they are, or copying Britney and Madonna. But it's also possible they were enjoying themselves. There's no way for an outsider to know, for in the protean world of young female sexuality, where all forms of expression are modeled, nothing is certain. Social scientists say that 5 percent to 7 percent of young people are gay or lesbian, and that teenagers are starting at younger ages to have same-sex sexual experiences: 13 for boys, 15 for girls. But those figures don't begin to tell the full story about today's girls because girls, more often than boys, experiment with their sexuality and resist being placed in any particular group. Chanda Harris, a junior at High Road Upper School in Beltsville, is one of these girls. She's standing outside Union Station on a cold Friday night, waiting for her girlfriend and holding three giant helium balloons in celebration of her friend's birthday. The girls around her from various high schools – Bladensburg in Maryland, Anacostia, Ballou, Cardozo and Coolidge in the District – converge to hear what she has to say. She started going out with girls when she was 14, following a breakup with her boyfriend. "At first I thought going out with a girl was nasty," she says. "Then I went to a club and did a big flip-flop. I've been off and on with girls and guys since then." Another girl, a junior at Anacostia High, says her first love was a guy now in the Marines and stationed in North Carolina. She dated Kenny for two years and his picture adorns her bedroom wall. Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] Chicago Tribune, December 10, 2003 India's gays see small improvement in cultural outlets Marriage-conscious society mostly frowns, but homosexuals are finding a club here and a movie there that accepts them. It's a 'sea change,' says one. By Vanessa Gezari, Special to the Tribune NEW DELHI - Under purple strobe lights, a man in a sleeveless T-shirt with "Daddy" on the front slow-dances with a long-haired guy in a tight seersucker blouse. At the bar, a slender man in a tie-dyed shirt whispers into the ear of his muscular friend, who wears iridescent green sunglasses despite the darkness of the room. In shadowy corners, under the stairs and behind the half-open door of the women's bathroom, men embrace, taking advantage of the relative safety of the Indian capital's only gay nightclub to meet and flirt. Others, unable to forget the stigma attached to homosexuality in India, sit alone at tables, eyeing the men on the dance floor with a mixture of admiration and anxiety. "If my family knew I was here, they'd kill me," said Samir Agarwal, a 25-year-old businessman who attended the weekly gay night at Pegs N' Pints, a New Delhi club, recently. "In India, if a family knows their child is gay, it creates a big chaos. Gays and lesbians are not acceptable. It's a matter of shame, a matter of embarrassment." In traditional India, where marriage is life's most important event and no family is complete without children and grandchildren, homosexuality is rarely acknowledged, let alone accepted. But increasingly, gay Indians are meeting in Internet chat rooms, organizing marches, hosting parties and showing up at support groups, generating a wave of activism that is bringing the gay community into public view. "It's been like a sea change," said Shaan Thadhani, 25, a fashion designer who returned to India recently after several years in Britain and attended the gay dance session at Pegs N' Pints, which is a bar catering to heterosexuals six nights a week and a gay club only on Tuesdays. "Before I went to London, we never had this. We had one support group. The scene here is very new." In the last year, the Bombay-based Indian film industry, known as Bollywood, has released several movies featuring gay characters, including "Mango Souffle" in which two male characters skinny dip in a pool. Activist writes novel "The Boyfriend," a novel published this year by Indian college professor and gay activist R. Raj Rao, offers what may be the most detailed account yet of gay life in Bombay, exploring the relationship between a journalist and his lover, who is an untouchable, a member of India's lowest caste. Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] The Times-Picayune, October 12, 2003 Straight Eye for the Queer Guy With all due respect to Bravo's 'Fab Five,' heterosexual guys aren't the only ones who could use a little making over. Meet Blaine Barker, a gay man who was game for getting his fashion sense set straight. Chris Rose Gay, shmay. I've just about had it up to here. Hollywood, the church, prime time, even The Times-Picayune wedding announcements: Everything says gay is cool, gay is hip, gay is so positively IN. Even Britney tried it out on the MTV Video Music Awards. But I'm here to make a stand. I'm here to tell you that straight can be cool, too. Someone needs to stand up for beer bellies, Old Spice, Jimmy Kimmel and the great American breakfast of convenience-store hot dogs and coffee. I'm hetero and proud of it. You offer me Will or Grace and I say: Give me Grace, dammit! I refuse to accept the premise that heterosexuals are passé. Just because I don't know the difference between Botox and sweat socks, don't know Prada from Pringles, doesn't mean I don't possess the Fabulous Gene. And, unlike your average beer swilling Joe, I'm willing to do something about it. My project is called Straight Eye for the Queer Guy, wherein we administer a little redneck rock, Budweiser, wings at Hooters and Monday Night Football to put a little butch back into an impossibly toned, Abercrombie & Fitch-clad, simply ab-fab Bourbon Street boy's life. A guy named Blaine Barker says to me on the phone, "I was just telling my friends the other day: There ought to be a 'Straight Eye for the Queer Guy.' I mean, I know some men who can't even change a tire!" "Agreed," I told Barker. "It's a project worthy of much effort. And we're going to start with you." I had checked his qualifications: He told me he last kissed a girl at his junior prom. That's not very gay, I thought. The next year, he took a boy to his senior prom. That's pretty gay. When he told me he lettered in sports, I thought: That's not very gay. When he told me it was hockey, I thought: Well, at least he was wearing skates. He works at a gay bar (Bourbon Pub), writes for a gay magazine (Hot Spots) and he can't name any special teams players on the Saints. And he signs his e-mails: "Hugs." Gay enough for me. For the project, I assembled the Flab Five. They're five soft-bellied guys I know mostly from softball and drinking. (Actually, one of them I met through my work in the theater, but I don't want to give you the wrong impression.) Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] San Francisco Chronicle,* April 18, 2003 Rosie's glad she did it Leah Garchik Rosie O'Donnell has been described as newly outspoken and aggressive since she came out. The change in her public personality may have been a result of her being post-talk show and post-magazine; she no longer has to depend on advertisers. The change in her inner life, she says, has been a result of her decision to come out. Accepting the Vito Russo Award from GLAAD - the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation - in New York this week, O'Donnell said friends had told her that coming out "would change my life." "But I never thought when they were telling me - whether it was Ellen or Nathan or Harvey or any of my friends who are out - I never thought for a moment what it would change in my own life. "I always thought it would be about the public perception, the adjective assigned to your name for eternity: 'lesbian Rosie O'Donnell, lesbian Rosie O'Donnell.' It's like 'Aries Rosie O'Donnell' or 'size-10-shoe Rosie O'Donnell.' What I didn't realize was that it would change everything about my life. And for the first time, I'm really, really, really happy." Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] Los Angeles Times, March 5, 2003 Theater Review: When soul and sexuality meet Cornerstone Theatre's 'Body of Faith,' part of an L.A. series, examines the role spirituality plays in the lives of everyday gays. By Daryl H. Miller, Times Staff Writer The first story in "Body of Faith," Cornerstone Theater's exploration of spirituality in the gay community, is about a boy who is assigned to look up a word in a school dictionary. While hunting for it, he happens upon a nearby listing for "homosexual" and is happy to discover that there's a word for people like him. When he shows the word to his teacher, however, she does not share his excitement. Neither does the principal, nor his mother. During a later visit to the dictionary, he finds that his word has been blotted out. "Body of Faith" goes on to relate the stories of gay people who've been treated the same way by religion. When not ignored outright, they've had select quotations from religious texts flung at them in condemnation. Often, they end up feeling that their sexuality is incompatible with spirituality. Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] Boston Globe, February 23, 2003 Different isles, different attitudes toward gay travelers By Amy K. Graves, Globe Staff So you want to escape to the Caribbean with your sweetie or your pals. A week sunning in soft sand and body-surfing the warm, cerulean waves equals one week less spent shoveling snow and fending off frostbite, no? Three winters ago (another tough one), my love and I looked up a travel agent in Harvard Square to book a package deal. Trying to sell us five nights on Grenada, she asked, ''Is this a mother-daughter trip?'' (My girlfriend and I are four years apart.) Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] Philadelphia Daily News, February 4, 2003 Gays in comics: A brief history It wasn't until the late 1980s that an openly gay character appeared in mainstream comics, when writer John Byrne introduced lesbian Captain Maggie Sawyer to the Metropolis Police Department – and readers of the "Superman" titles. "Gay characters in comics have been few and far between," said Martin King, co-owner of Showcase Comics on South Street. "The depiction of such has been negligible at best." And it wasn't until 1992 that the first hero came out of the closet: Northstar, in "Alpha Flight" No. 106. Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] Philadelphia Daily News, February 4, 2003 "Out" in the Old West Marvel Comics reintroduces Rawhide Kid – and he's gay By Jerome Maida, For the Daily News Marvel Comics will continue to push the envelope of comic book story lines and reach out to new readers with the arrival Wednesday of its reinterpretation of the classic Western series "Rawhide Kid." A loner in the Old West, Rawhide Kid is a skilled fighter – one of the most feared and respected enforcers of the time. He also happens to be gay, and it is this revelation that has created a firestorm of controversy that caught even Marvel by surprise. "We didn't put much energy into this at all," said series editor Axel Alonso of the publicity the book has received. "Who could expect that a little Western could have this amount of impact?" Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] Village Voice, January 15-21, 2003 Richard Goldstein Persecuting Pee-wee A Child-Porn Case That Threatens Us All Paul Reubens is no stranger to the sex police. In 1991, he was busted in a Sarasota porn theater and charged with the ultimate victimless crime: whacking off during a showing of Nancy Nurse. Reubens pleaded no contest, and the case became a tabloid sensation. "I was leading the news," he later told Vanity Fair, "followed by Dahmer eating people, boring holes into their heads, and turning them into zombies." Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] Gay.com (U.K.), January 10, 2003 NBC Picks Up Ellen DeGeneres Talk Show by A Bendersky for Gay.com/PlanetOut.com Network While the US lost one lesbian daytime talk show host in 2002, television viewers can look forward to another taking her place this year. NBC announced on Tuesday it had picked up "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," an hour-long syndicated talk show that will air five days a week, in all 14 NBC-owned and -operated stations in 30 percent of the country. Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] Denver Post, January 7, 2003 Royal Crash Drag queens join gay guerrilla partygoers as they take over straight bars for the evening By Elana Ashanti Jefferson, Denver Post Staff Writer You know the party's a success when a towering, raven-haired drag queen tames a mechanical bull long enough for cameras to capture her pose. This was the scene at The Grizzly Rose one Saturday in November, when same-sex dance partners overwhelmed the traditional two-step crowd, and clean-cut pretty boys outnumbered the club's regulars - rough-knuckled cowboys. Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2003 Documentary on PBS revisits Lance Loud in his 'twilight' Loud became America's first gay icon on TV and arguably its first "reality" star. By Josh Friedman, Times Staff Writer Lance Loud was deteriorating in a Southern California hospice when he glanced at a photo of himself from "An American Family," the landmark 1973 documentary miniseries. "That's me in the morning," he said. "This is me in the twilight." In December 2001, Loud left the world in the same way he burst onto the world's stage: with the TV cameras rolling. But he was not the same guy. Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] T.V. Guide, December 24, 2002 INSIDER Party Boy, aka Daniel R. Coleridge Billy Campbell's Night "Out" This month, Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin was honored at "A Cracked X-Mas 5," Hollywood's fifth annual comedy benefit for The Trevor Helpline, a national crisis number for gay youth. But while gay friendly stand-ups including Anthony Clark (Yes, Dear) got yuks on stage, the best laughs were outside on the red carpet! Click here for the full-length story [back to the top] Los Angeles Times, November 9, 2002 Showtime plans a lesbian series By Brian Lowry Showtime, which has garnered attention and some of its highest ratings with the gay-themed serial "Queer as Folk," has ordered a dramatic program dealing with the lesbian community in Los Angeles, tentatively titled "Earthlings," to premiere next summer. Jennifer Beals ("Flashdance"), Pam Grier ("Jackie Brown") and "24's" Mia Kirshner are part of the ensemble cast. Showtime's parent company, Viacom, has been exploring the possibility of launching a gay cable network. Reruns of "Queer as Folk" (which will begin its third season next year) and the new series are both seen as potential programming for the new channel. E-Mail: letters@latimes.com Click here for the full-length story. [back to the top] Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2002 Number of Gay TV Characters Plummets Television: In spite of the sharp decline on scripted series, due to the cancellation of several notable shows, activists see increasing acceptance. By Brian Lowry, Times Staff Writer Steve Martin gazed out at the Hollywood crowd as he hosted last year's Oscars and tried to surmise what the vast television audience must be thinking: "They're all gay," he said. Yet for all the jokes about the entertainment industry embracing - or, in the eyes of religious conservatives, promoting - the cause of gays and lesbians, this year's prime-time lineup will actually witness a sharp decline in the number of regular or recurring gay, lesbian and transgender characters. According to data compiled by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, the major TV networks featured 20 such characters in prime time last season, scattered across 16 series - including since-canceled "The Ellen Show," starring Ellen DeGeneres; and "The Education of Max Bickford," with actress Helen Shaver playing a man who became a woman. E-Mail: letters@latimes.com Click here for the full-length story.


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