Supreme Court Rebuffs Florida — Marriages to Begin

It’s more bad news for antigay Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, as the nation’s highest court rejects her request to delay marriage equality in the Sunshine State after January 6.

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Matt Baume

www.advocate.com/politics/marriage-equality/2014/12/19/supreme-court-rebuffs-florida-marriages-begin

The Top 10 Bestselling Gay Sex Books of 2014

As a sex-advice columnist, I like to keep up with the latest books on gay sex. Given how obsessed gay men are with the subject, you’d think this category would be producing more titles than an automatic profile generator on Grindr, but it isn’t. If you look at my list of the top 10 most popular gay-sex books on Amazon, you’ll see that only one of the books was published in 2014. The rest go as far back as 1998! Take a look:

1. How to Bottom Like a Porn Star*
Published: 2014
Amazon ranking: 35,000

2. How to Bottom Without Pain or Stains
Published: 2013
Amazon ranking: 44,000

3. The Joy of Gay Sex
Published: 2006
Amazon ranking: 80,000

4. Anal Health and Pleasure
Published: 2011
Amazon ranking: 149,000

5. How to Ejaculate More and Shoot Further
Published: 2013
Amazon ranking: 160,000

(Click here to see the rest of the list.)

Want to know what “Amazon ranking” means and how it translates to the number of books sold per day? Click here. You’ll be able to look at any book on Amazon and estimate how many have been sold (a neat trick to impress your writer friends!).

Why would there be so few gay-sex-advice books on the market? Gay men are at least as interested in sex as straight men, yet there are far more sex guides for them than there are for us.

We Know More Than They Do

Clearly, one of the main reasons has to do with innate knowledge. When it comes to relating, men are from Mars and women are from Venus. But when it comes to sex, men are from Pluto and women are from Narnia. Their sexual plumbing couldn’t be any more different, and because of that, men’s ignorance could not be starker. That opens up (pun intended) a huge market to fill the void.

But that isn’t necessarily true for gay men. Our plumbing works exactly the same way. You say “tomato” and I say “tomatoh,” but we’re still talking about the same vegetable (or fruit, depending on your politics or your botanical background). We don’t need to be told to do this or that for him, because we’re doing it for ourselves. It doesn’t take much to understand that he’s probably going to like what we do.

Still, gay men are men, and as the old Polish saying goes, “If there are tires or testicles, there will be trouble,” meaning male ignorance knows no bounds and pride enforces silence. Many of the letters I get to my sex-advice column are astoundingly ignorant. One good book out of our top-10 list would’ve stopped them from being written.

Just because your sexual plumbing is nearly identical to your partner doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be good at sex, though. Raise your hand if you’ve ever gone home with a guy who was so bad at sex that the Peeping Tom put down the binoculars. Now keep those hands up. The odds are some guys were thinking about you when they raised their hands. The truth is that being good in bed is a learned behavior. Few of us are born knowing what to do and how to do it.

And that’s why we buy gay-sex-advice books — because some of us, and I include myself, know what we don’t know and like the idea of constantly improving our ability to experience and deliver pleasure.

There’s Just Not Enough of Us

But there’s another reason that gay-sex books don’t sell well, and it’s the same reason that most gay books — fiction or nonfiction — don’t do well: Gay men don’t buy gay books. Raise your hand if you bought any kind of gay book in the last year. Keep them raised if you bought two or more.

I assure you that the pitiful number of hands that went up had nothing to do with worries about underarm stains. There are hardly any gay bookstores left in America, but you would be wrong if you thought that the only thing that decimated them was Amazon and the rise of digital books. Gay bookstores had always struggled even before the dawn of the digital age. When you combine how few of us there are (what, 6 percent of the population?) with how little interest we have in gay subject matter (other than porn), you have a recipe for what’s happened: gay book stores nearing extinction, and, with the exception of Kensington Books, no profitable gay publishing houses.

Still, the need is there, and gay books will never go away. If you haven’t bought one in a while, pick one out of Amazon’s list of the top 100 gay and lesbian bestsellers. It’d make a great holiday gift for you or someone you love.

*I authored this book under a pseudonym.

www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-alvear/the-top-10-bestselling-gay-sex-books-of-2014_b_6347882.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Lesbian Basketballers Sue Pepperdine for Discrimination

Two women say their coach and others harassed them and wanted them off the team at the Christian university.

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Annie Hollenbeck

www.advocate.com/sports/2014/12/19/lesbian-basketballers-sue-pepperdine-discrimination

In Memory of Danny Garvin, One of the Heroic Homeless LGBT Youths Who Fought in the Stonewall Uprising (PHOTOS)
A true hero of our LGBT movement died last week when Danny Garvin passed away after a struggle with hepatitis and cancer.

Danny helped give birth to our liberation when he fought in the Stonewall uprising. He was there that first night and several nights after, fighting in the streets, battling the police who had raided the Stonewall Inn.

At the time, Danny was a homeless youth. Many of the warriors who ignited our movement that night were homeless LGBT youths, who then, as now, made the West Village their home.

Over the past few years I’ve had the honor and joy of getting to know Danny as he has volunteered to advocate for the homeless LGBT youths of the Ali Forney Center. Last year he wrote to me about why he had such empathy for our kids:

I wish there had been something like the Ali Forney Center for me when I was on the streets. Maybe I would not have had to live so many nights of out lockers in Port Authority on 42nd St. Or sell myself for 8 dollars to have a bed to sleep to in and a place to shower. Just some place to be hidden from the world until the next day when it would all start all over again. I know I would have robbed less food from stores just to get something to eat.

In 1969, as in 2014, to be open about being LGBT put youths at terrible risk of homelessness. Then, as now, LGBT kids were suffering on the streets. Then, as now, many had to turn, like Danny, to hustling in order to survive.

My first conversation with Danny was painful. We were preparing for a press conference demanding a governmental commitment to the homeless youths of New York City. I asked Danny how the gay world at the time of Stonewall related to the street kids who lived in the Village.

“The respectable gays didn’t want to have anything to do with us,” he told me. “To them we were trash. They looked at us with contempt.”

I had asked Danny to speak at the press conference for homeless LGBT youths in front of the Stonewall Inn, to describe the role of street kids in the uprising, and to describe his personal experience of being a homeless LGBT youth. He was happy to do so, and his speech was powerful. He spoke of the scars that he carried from his time on the streets, and how he had spent years struggling with shame from having stolen food and sold his body to survive. He connected the realities of suffering on the streets in 1969 to now. Afterwards he wrote to me, “It was the first time I ever talked about being a homeless kid in public. I was more than humbled that you asked me. God knows I was shaking like a leaf when I was finished.”

I cannot think of Stonewall without reflecting in awe and wonder at the street kids who put their bodies on the line that night. I think of Danny, of his good friend and co-rioter Martin Boyce, of Miss New Orleans, the homeless trans girl who uprooted a parking meter and used it as a battering ram to destroy the door of the Stonewall Inn, behind which the police had retreated in fear. I think of Marsha Jonson and Sylvia Rivera.

The homeless LGBT youths of the Village had lost almost everything; many had been driven from their homes and left destitute in the streets. Because they were far and away the most visible LGBT people to be found at that time, they were targets for abuse; beating up on them was a city sport.

But they had not lost their defiance, or their pride. They had not lost their sense of solidarity with their LGBT sisters and brothers, even if they were looked on as trash. And the night of the uprising they were the storm troopers of our rebellion, fighting the police with all their hearts. With their courage they showed that they were not our trash; the truth is they were our treasure.

Danny was featured in the PBS documentary Stonewall Uprising, speaking about the consequences of that momentous night:

We became a people. We didn’t necessarily know where we were going yet, you know, what organizations we were going to be or how things would go, but we became something I, as a person, could all of a sudden grab onto, that I couldn’t grab onto when I’d go to a subway T-room as a kid, or a 42nd Street movie theater, you know, or being picked up by some dirty old man. You know, all of a sudden, I had brothers and sisters, you know, which I didn’t have before. There was no going back now…. We had discovered a power that we weren’t even aware that we had.

The Stonewall uprising was the birth of our LGBT movement. That night the street kids and hustlers and scare queens helped create the space for the rest of us to be out, to be proud. We owe them our lives.

The LGBT movement has created vast opportunities for us to have better lives than could have been dreamed of in 1969. But as life has gotten so much better for most of us, it is still horrific for our homeless LGBT youths. As we grow in freedom and power, youths are ever more emboldened to come out. And too many of them are still rejected by their families and driven to the streets. We have fought to protect the rights of LGBT people and have won remarkable victories. But for our homeless LGBT youths not much has changed since 1969. There are at least 200,000 homeless LGBT youths on the streets of the U.S.A. And despite our power and accomplishments as a movement, we have only created about 350 housing units dedicated to these 200,000 homeless LGBT youths. And so in 2014 our kids continue to suffer in the cold, and be hurt and exploited in the streets, as Danny was in 1969.

It meant the world to me when Danny and Martin Boyce agreed to be advocates for homeless LGBT youths, when they raised their voices with ours in demanding that our city, state and federal governments stop leaving youths homeless in the streets without shelter, and asserting that every young person in this nation deserves a bed to sleep in. Who could be better to assert that protecting our homeless youths must become a priority of our movement than the warriors whose courage made that movement possible?

Danny was never able to forget what it meant to be a homeless teen. He overcame homelessness and built a good life for himself, but he bore the scars in his psyche, and in his body. He contracted hepatitis while he was homeless; it shortened his life.

Last year I asked Danny and Martin to be my honored guests at our annual fundraising dinner. Danny’s health wasn’t so great, but I was thrilled that he was able to join us. Afterwards he emailed me:

When you were reading your speech on Friday all these hurts came back to me and I started to cry, It will alway be a part of me…Once again I cannot thank you for all the help you give to these kids. I know how deep their cuts and pain are.

The last time I saw Danny was this past June in the White House, of all places. He and Martin were invited to the Pride celebration there and had the remarkable experience of meeting President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, in recognition of their heroism and contributions to our movement. Afterwards we gathered under the official portrait of Jackie Kennedy, to be photographed at the insistence of our friend Junior Labeija. I’m glad that I was able to be with Danny on that momentous day, to see the culmination of his journey from being a despised street kid to being rightly recognized as a heroic pioneer of our liberation. I’m grateful that my last sight of him alive on this Earth was to see him there, beaming with happiness and pride.

Rest in peace, my friend. I thank you for your kind and generous heart. And I thank you for your warrior spirit on the night of the uprising. We owe you a debt of gratitude deeper than I could ever express.

www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-siciliano/in-memory-of-danny-garvin_b_6354776.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Same-Sex Marriages Will Begin in Florida January 6 After SCOTUS Declines to Stay Ruling

U.S. Supreme Court declines to extend stay on federal court ruling striking down state ban on marriage equality
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/same-sex-marriages-will-begin-in-florida-january-6-after-scotus-declines-to?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

Brendan Jordan Takes Down His Homophobic Haters With Advice We Should All Follow

When video of young Brendan Jordan vogueing in the background of a Las Vegas news report went viral last month, the 15-year-old became an instant mini-sensation, landing an American Apparel modeling gig and a much-discussed appearance on Queen Latifah’s talk show. It’s natural that along with such exposure for a gay boy who calls himself a queen and identifies with Lady Gaga comes not only scrutiny, but Jordan’s also faced intense, sometimes brutal criticism about perpetuating stereotypes.

It’s refreshing to learn that Jordan is so confident and self-aware that he gives not one fuck about all the nasty hatred from anonymous internet trolls. Well, maybe half a fuck since he filmed a video to respond to some of the more vile tweets he’s read about himself.

“If you don’t like this, you can click the X button,” Jordan suggests. Those are some words to live by.

Watch Jordan take down the haters below.

Jeremy Kinser

feedproxy.google.com/~r/queerty2/~3/eVaezfZknKU/brendan-jordan-takes-down-all-his-homophobic-haters-with-advice-we-should-all-follow-20141219

Conchita Wurst Returns As Presenter And Host For 2015 Eurovision Contest

Anthony Costello

www.towleroad.com/2014/12/conchita-wurst-returns-as-presenter-and-host-for-2015-eurovision-contest.html