Rihanna: 'Everybody Loves Elizabeth Taylor!'

The “Diamonds” singer spoke to The Advocate about her role model in HIV activism and her support of a new film, It’s Not Over, that will educate young people about the virus.

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Daniel Reynolds

www.advocate.com/health/here-inspire/2014/12/01/rihanna-everybody-loves-elizabeth-taylor

12 Insanely Tacky Gay Decorations To Make Your Christmas More Mary

OK, now that we’re just about through with Thanksgiving, it’s finally an appropriate time to talk about Christmas. Break out the wreaths and lights and baubles and whatnot!

While many gays have a decorator’s eye, other gay households … how to put this nicely … don’t exactly have a style queen at the ready. And that’s OK! We can’t all be Martha Stewart. If you don’t have a knack for decorating, all you have to do is commit to going as tacky and hideous as possible.

We’ve rounded up some inspiration for you below, starting with James and Sebastian, who have decided to go with a rainbow motif this year. When you’re done using it under your tree, you can fashion it into a hoop skirt and wear it to the spring cotillion.

We’re going to have to balk at any ornament that involves putting the word “sex” all over a Christmas tree.

We can’t hate this testacle-ornament too much, since it’s designed to raise awareness of testicular cancer. So, OK, fine. We’re aware. We don’t know what good it does for us to be reminded of cancer every time we look at a Christmas tree, but anyway, mission accomplished. Maybe you can invite all your friends over and do a self-check together while sipping cocoa.

Albinism can strike anyone, even trees. Be sure to pair your ghostly apparition with a topless painting of a woman who sort of resembles Rita Moreno.

If you’re going to decorate homosexually, you can either go big or go home. We actually love what the Homorazzi team has done here, slathering a gingerbread house with so much glitz and noise that it’s become completely inedible and a little threatening, just like Lady Gaga herself. What could be more appetizing than a gingerbread lady with actual hair? And the meatroof is a perfect touch. The chimney appears to have caught on fire.

Oh, look, it’s a tree made of Pepto-Bismol.

Just the thing for the man in your life who adores both football and The Little Mermaid. It’s a difficult sport to play under the sea, and the Homecoming bonfire is always a bust, but this jock perseveres.

Two men cavort next to what appears to be a snowman made of sand. One of them is raising his taint so that he may express an anal gland to scent-mark his work. This is how gay men communicate.

Not quite sure what’s going on with this one. It appears to be two bald Mister Cleans in an apocalyptic hellscape, or possibly World 8 of a Mario Bros game. One of them is about ot knee the other in the groin.

Here’s a tasteful holiday wreath. Nothing unseemly here, no sir. Dick the halls!

You can also wear your hideous decor with pride, as did Fausto Fernós of Feast of Fun. He appears to be doing the robot, a traditional Christmas dance.

But perhaps the most horrifying of the bunch is this: an original John Waters bauble, complete with dead cockroach. Happy holidays!

matt baume

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Gay Marriage News Watch: MS, AR, FL, WY, MI – VIDEO

Kyler Geoffroy

www.towleroad.com/2014/12/gay-marriage-news-watch-ms-ar-fl-wy-mi-video.html

30 Amazing HIV-Positive Gay Men

Here are 30 great guys who HIV Plus magazine named to its annual list of men who are reinventing what it means to be HIV-positive.

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Advocate.com Editors

www.advocate.com/health/here-inspire/2014/12/01/30-amazing-hiv-positive-gay-men

Once, When Gay Men Were Heroes

Queerty contributor Mark S. King posted this World AIDS Day remembrance on his blog My Fabulous Disease.

My brother Richard smiles a lot. He has an easy laugh. But there was a time, years ago, when he held a poisonous drink in his hands and begged his dying lover not to swallow it. A time when Richard held the concoction they had prepared together and wept.

Emil couldn’t wait. He took the drink from Richard quickly, because the release it offered was something more rapturous than the appeals of his lover of thirteen years.

It was Emil’s wish to die on his own terms if living became unbearable, a promise made one to the other. When that time arrived, however, Richard wanted another moment, just a little more time to say, “I love you, Emil,” over and over again, before the drink would close Emil’s eyes and quietly kill him.

Richard has a charming store in my hometown today, where he sells collectibles and does theater in his free time. The drink was consumed over twenty years ago.

There were people who displayed remarkable courage then. People who lived and died by their promises and shared the intimacy of death, and then the world moved forward and grief subsided and lives moved on. But make no mistake, there are heroes among us right now.

There is a shy, friendly man at my gym. There was a time when his sick roommate deliberately overdosed after his father told him that people with unspeakable diseases will suffer in hell. My gym friend performed CPR for an hour before help arrived, but the body never heard a loving word again.

There is courage among us, astonishing courage, and we summoned it and survived. And then years passed. We got new jobs and changed gyms.

There was a time when old friends called to say goodbye, and by “goodbye” they meant forever. When all of us had a file folder marked “Memorial” that outlined how we wanted our service to be conducted. When people shot themselves and jumped off bridges after getting their test results.

There is profound, shocking sadness here, right here among us, but years went by and medicine got better and we found other lives to lead. Our sadness is a distant, dark dream.

My best friend Stephen just bought a new condo. He’s having a ball picking out furniture. But there was a time when he knew all the intensive care nurses by name. When a phone call late at night always meant someone had died. And just who, exactly, was anyone’s guess.

Stephen tested positive in the 1980s, shortly after I did. A few months after the devastating news, he agreed to facilitate a support group with me. We regularly saw men join the group, get sick and die, often within weeks.

Watching them disintegrate felt like a preview of coming attractions. But Stephen was remarkable, a reassuring presence to everyone, and worked with the group for more than a year despite the emotional toll and the high body count.

There is bravery here, still, living all around us. But the bravest time was many years ago, and times change and the yard needs landscaping and there’s a brunch tomorrow.

There was a time when I sat beside friends in their very last minutes of life, and I helped them relax, perhaps surrender, and told them comforting stories. And lied to them.

Jeremy lost his mind weeks before he died. Sometimes he had moments of sanity, when we could have a coherent conversation before his dementia engulfed him again. It was a time when you were given masks and gloves to visit friends in the hospital.

He was agitated with the business of dying, and told me he couldn’t bear to miss what might happen after he’d gone. I had an idea.

“I tell you what,” I offered, “I’m from the future, and I can tell you anything you would like to know.”

“OK then, what happens to my parents?” he asked. I thought it might be a distracting game, but Jeremy’s confused mind took it very seriously.

“They went to Hollywood and won big on a game show, so they never did need your support in their old age,” I answered. He barely took the time to enjoy this thought before his hand grabbed my wrist, tightly, almost frantically. He pulled me closer.

“When…” he began, and a mournful sob swelled inside him in an instant, his eyes begging for relief. “When does this end?” There was an awful, helpless silence. His eyes beckoned for a truth he could die believing.

“It does end,” I finally managed, although nothing suggested it would. “It ends, Jeremy, but not for a really long time.” He digested each word like a revelation, and slowly relaxed into sleep.

There is compassion here, enough for all the world’s deities and saints acting in concert. Infinite compassion for men who lived in fear and checked every spot when they showered for Kaposi sarcoma, and for disowned sons wasting away in the guest room of whoever had the space. But we get older, and friends don’t ask us to hold their hand when they stop breathing, and the fear fades and I bought new leather loafers and the White Party is coming.

The truth is simply this, and no one will convince me otherwise: My most courageous self, the best man that I’ll ever be, lived more than two decades ago during the first years of a horrific plague.

He worked relentlessly alongside a million others who had no choice but to act. He secretly prayed to survive, even above the lives of others, and his horrible prayer was answered with the death of nearly everyone close to him.

To say I miss that brutal decade would only be partially true. I miss the man I was forced to become, when an entire community abandoned tea dances for town hall meetings, when I learned to offer help to those facing what terrified me most.

Today, the lives of those of us who witnessed the horror have become relatively normal again, perhaps mundane. We prefer it. We have new lives in a world that isn’t choking on disease.

But once, there was a time when we were heroes.

Mark

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Florida DMV: Married Gays Not Allowed to Drive (VIDEO)
More victories this week in some very conservative states. We’re now closer than ever to the start of marriage in Arkansas and Mississippi. Florida is refusing to issue drivers’ licenses to a couple after they married and changed their last name. And support for marriage has skyrocketed in Wyoming.

This week’s big wins were in Arkansas and Mississippi. In both states, Federal District Court judges ruled that marriage bans are unconstitutional. But they also imposed a stay on their decisions so that the states will have time to appeal. Both of those appeals are going to be a little complicated. The Arkansas case will go to the Eighth Circuit, but there’s also a separate marriage case before the Arkansas Supreme Court right now. They could rule at any time, and it’s hard to say how that decision would affect the federal case.

In Mississippi, the case will go to the Fifth Circuit. Oral argument is already scheduled for early January in the Fifth Circuit for cases in Louisiana and Texas. So if the state moves fast, the Mississippi case might join them. Attorney General Jim Hood and Governor Phil Bryant have already filed a notice of appeal.

There’s a new lawsuit in Florida. The state cancelled the drivers’ licenses of a gay couple after they married in New York and hyphenated their last name. Even though it’s their new legal name, the state of Florida is refusing to recognize it, so they’ve sued. Over in Wyoming, a new survey shows support for marriage equality is up to 53% to 39% opposed. That’s a big jump from ten years ago, when support was just 24%. And in Michigan, Attorney General Bill Schuette has asked the Supreme Court not to take up a marriage case, and allow the state’s marriage ban to remain in place. The Supreme Court could make a decision about whether to hear the Michigan case any day now.

www.huffingtonpost.com/gay-voices/?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices