They say all revolutions eat their young and I'm not sure we should be throwing Melissa Etheridge under the bus just yet. Post-Prop. 8, she's been one of the loudest and most public voices in explaining to everyday Americans why marriage equality is important, bringing her message to Oprah and The View. She refuses to pay taxes until she gets marriage equality. The battle for equal rights has many fronts and many tactics. Etheridge wants to build bridges between the gay community and potential allies and seeing as we are and always will be a minority, this is important and vital work.
That said, Melissa Etheridge's praise of Pastor Rick Warren is unwarranted.
QUEERTY REPORTS — "A new step" in gay cinema is how director Gus Van Sant described his Harvey Milk biopic last night at a Q&A following a screening at the the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Queerty attended, if only to see if Van Sant was as charmingly handsome as he seemed in his Entourage cameo. (Answer: He most certainly is.) Fielding a handful of questions after Milk's credits rolled, Van Sant was lauded by the audience. A 25-year-old blonde New York transplant, who says he is still harassed daily, even in New York, and saw new hope in the film, gave the director a tearful "thank you." An executive from the Hetrick-Martin Institute, home to New York's gay-friendly Harvey Milk High School, attended with some of his students, and commended Van Sant for perfectly capturing Milk's "legacy." And of course, somebody asked the director how he felt the film could have impacted Proposition 8, if only it came out before the election. And that's where he surprised us:
Who says there won't be anything funny to riff on in an Obama administration. Did you think all those racist homophobes are just going to give up and slink quietly away, with their Jackson Pollack hate-message posters tucked under their arms?
Nate Silver, the power nerd who has of late been making it his job to take bigots to task, spoke to sister site Queerty about Prop 8's passage and the statistics behind it. Here's what he had to say about the controversial African American vote:
Hey guys, take two guesses where Red Eye's Greg Gutfeld stands on the Prop 8 issue. While talking about the existence of aliens (and 9/11?), Gutfeld smarmily announced yesterday morning:
"Look, I don’t dispute that aliens exist, but there are more urgent matters to deal with, other than wrinkly creatures with a knack for anal probing. But enough about Barney Frank…I couldn’t resist."
Ha…ha? Because, you get it, Frank Barney is totes gay, and recently humiliated Fox pundit Bill O'Reilly. So that's a joke. Get it??
It's taken just two weeks for the protests against Prop. 8 to go from historical moment to Weekly World News pop-culture parody, which has to be a record. There really needs to be some sort of index based off of the time it takes between an event happening and the moment a Bat Boy article is done about said event.
Or maybe this is how Neil McGinness over at Bat Boy LTD, who recently bought Weekly World News from David Pecker, is reinventing the rag as culturally ironic?
Fresh off his role as the punchline to Gov. Mike Huckabee's presidential bid, Chuck Norris is taking a fresh stab at politics by weighing in on Proposition 8 protests. In an op-ed called "If Democracy Doesn't Work, Try Anarchy", he cries "Where are the hate-crime cops when religious conservatives need them?"
And she didn't even need the cover of People to do it.
Having never (so?) publicly discussed her sexual orientation — but having made light of it on stage and on The New Adventures of Old Christine — comedian Wanda Sykes surprised Las Vegas Prop 8 protesters by announcing she is gay and married her wife on Oct. 25. Why speak up now? Because of Prop 8's passage. "I felt like I was being attacked, personally attacked — our community was attacked. … Now, I gotta get in their face. … I'm proud to be a woman. I'm proud to be a black woman, and I'm proud to be gay. … Instead of having gay marriage in California — no — we're going to get it across the country."
Alan Stock, the head of the large movie chain Cinemark, which also goes by the names by Century Theatre, CineArts and Tinseltown, gave $9,999 to the 'Yes on 8' campaign. Now there is a national-wide boycott of these theatres by people who think gay marriage should be legalized, which I guess includes everyone, because who can even afford to go to the movies anymore??
Columbus Circle in New York City was filled with chants of "Gay, Straight, Black, White, Marriage is a Civil Right!" as thousands of protesters came out in opposition to California's Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California last week. The event was the largest protest outside of California so far and shows how quickly and rapidly organized opposition to Prop 8. has sprung up across the country.
Yep, the gays mobilized in huge numbers after losing their right to homosexual marriage.
The latest wrinkle in the Prop. 8 whodunit blame game comes from FiveThirtyEight's adorkable Nate Silver, who breaks down the demographics on the California vote. "Certainly, the No on 8 folks might have done a better job of outreach to California's black and Latino communities. But the notion that Prop 8 passed because of the Obama turnout surge is silly", he claims. Instead, he says the numbers place the blame at the feet of older voters across all demographics:
Queerty commenter Michael alerted us to this super-duper pressingly important PSA from the Upright Citizen's Brigade that all Prop. 8 supporters should see. It's important now that they've won one battle, that they be ideologically consistent with their beliefs and make marriage safe by eliminating the family-destroying, children's-tears-inducing world of divorce.
Unfortunately, you had to know this was coming.
Angered by the news that black voters were a major factor in the success of Prop 8, California's gay marriage ban, some segments of yesterday's anti-Prop 8 protests in LA soon devolved into hateful pits of racism:
Geoffrey, a student at UCLA and regular Rod 2.0 reader, joined the massive protest outside the Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Westwood. Geoffrey was called the n-word at least twice.
It was like being at a klan rally except the klansmen were wearing Abercrombie polos and Birkenstocks. YOU NIGGER, one man shouted at men. If your people want to call me a FAGGOT, I will call you a nigger. Someone else said same thing to me on the next block near the temple…me and my friend were walking, he is also gay but Korean, and a young WeHo clone said after last night the niggers better not come to West Hollywood if they knew what was BEST for them.
Starting at Sunset Junction in Silver Lake at 6 p.m. and arriving eight and a half hours later in West Hollywood at around 2:30 a.m., the Los Angeles Prop 8. protest ended early Sunday with a sit-in in the middle of the street. Throughout the night, groups would join the protest as it made its way through Hollywood and environs. While passing through the Sunset Strip, the rally picked up everyone's favorite angel, Drew Barrymore — and paparazzi — who marched with the approximately 3,000 swing shift protesters. As the exhausted but defiant crowd occupied the intersection of San Vicente and Santa Monica, Drew took to the microphone, tearfully telling the assembled crowd, "I will fight with you!"
Yes, Barack Obama is now the leader-elect of this shitty country that's getting worse by the minute, and we were all very very happy last night that, like The Onion said, "who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American."
But stuff still sucks this morning, and in case you forgot about that, take a look at what happened to
gay marriage in Florida and Arizona.
Oh, and Prop 8 (basically) passed in California, meaning that Ellen and Portia are going to have a hell of a time untangling the mess of their now legislatively unrecognized marriage:
Yesterday saw a letter from a concerned reader at The Advocate, who was worried that Ellen DeGeneres hadn't sent any money to an organization combating Proposition 8, the bill that would ban gay marriages in California. Did Ellen, who recently married wife Portia De Rossi in one of these marriages, actually secretly want her partnership to be nullified. No, that is a stupid thing to think.
And now Ellen has released a video showing her anti-support of Proposition 8, which means the check is in the mail, or something:
