TMZ mocks ABC's phony 'Brokeback bachelors'

ABC even made a promo for the bachelorette featuring the two faking the rainbow. But it was all a joke they thought up, you understand, not suggested to them by the realty show's producers, OK?


(Via Towleroad)

Chick-fil-A franchise to supply free chicken sandwiches to Iowa City gay picnic

Via Queerty, KCRG, and USA Today. We were going to say something about this, but we decided not to.

Watch: the first televised gay documentary aired in U.S.

The video, from a 1961 program with a budget of $100,  can be seen here.  From Back2Stonewall:

This copy of The Rejected was lost for many years and has been restored as much as it could. The Library of Congress states that there were several problems with the edited 2-inch quad videotape master. Many different tape stocks were used to create this program and the quality of these was often poor. The base of the tape is slippery at times, which causes an unstable control track. The stock was also physically heavy, which causes tension during take up. The audio quality is consistent throughout but there are three extended sequences – noted onscreen by subtitles – which feature bad picture quality. The Library’s Recording Laboratory remastered these 2-inch tapes onto digital. You can watch The Rejected in its entirety here.

 (H/T: Nebraskans For Equlity)

Hey gay tourists! Ride a cool tank in Minnesota or collect stamps at Nebraska tourist traps! The choice is yours...

More on the backstory of the two in the Minnesota Tourism ad...



The following, sadly, is the featured video on Nebraska Tourism's YouTube channel, because remember: Nebraska's 3rd largest industry exists to bring Gov. Pete Ricketts more media exposure.



As you can see, the dynamic tourism video featuring Ricketts has attracted SIX HUNDRED TEN views in only one month of exposure on YouTube.
    Boy — your GOP governor and mine really knows how to market the state, doesn't he? Good thing we have a savvy businessman at the helm, huh?

Commenter of the week: UNL's Right Wing Professor

Well, it was the comment of the week to homocentric us anyway. We always get a kick out of desperation by conservatives stricken with the gays-no-longer-know-their-place-and-now-the-walls-of-modern-morees-are-closing-in-on-us blues.
     This week's sad variation on that theme came from none other than Gerard Harbison, UNL's famous Right Wing Professor.
     Harbison's new beef was that the blogmaster at LeavenworthSt., the sadly popular Nebraska conservative blog, walked back a homophobic epithet directed at heterosexual John Oliver because he hilariously savaged Gov. Pete Ricketts on his HBO show:

     Gerard, you disappoint us! After all, blog comments are not limited to 140 characters, like your tweets. You had plenty of room for an entire laundry list of epithets referring to gays, not just four! We know you wanted to, so why didn't you knock yourself out exploiting a rare, if flimsy, opportunity to spew a few more slurs before the final day of reckoning when the liberal PC police show up at your door with a multi-colored tank and take your liberty, your food, your guns and your freedom to behave badly on the Internet by gleefully reciting class-insults?
     Harbison was reacting to the disclaimer below, by Streetsweeper, who blamed what he wrote on an old book by P.J. O'Rourke, and who preposterously asserted that "poofter" somehow morphed into a gay insult after O'Rourke began publishing his garish right-wing drivel (a proposition not even Harbison believes) and who also, in a tweet, asserted that "poofter" is gay slang (instead of invective invented by straight homophobes.)

What bullshit. Webster's (hardly an "urban" dictionary) says "poofter" has been a disparaging term for gays since 1903, long before the lamentable appearance of either P.J. O'Rouke and his over-the-top, too-clever-by-half rants or Jerry Kratochvil.

Sure Jerry. "Poofter" is gay slang because gays invented it as a gift to bigots, just the way Czechs invented the word "Bohunk" in order to insult themselves.

Minnesota tourism: Don't ask, do sell

Update: The ad turns out to be not so gay-vague as we thought. The partners actually are gay and married. Their 13-year-old daughter recently met with Minnesota's governor, who said this:

“Well, Minnesota is just a reflection of the world,” Gov. Dayton said, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I think it is really important for us to show that regular families — whether gay families or heterosexual families — represent Minnesota. We want to send a clear message to everyone, which we have done over and over again, that Minnesota is one of the friendliest states to the LGBT community and as a state we will protect everybody.”

The voiceover:

Plan nothing.
But prepare for anything.
Dare to try.
And laugh when you do.
Go from comfort zone...
to "well, this is a first."

AKSARBENT has also seen another Minnesota Tourism commercial filled with shirtless boy-next-door types, but those don't seem to be on YouTube yet. We'll keep looking, dear readers.



UPDATE: We found the other ad, "Buddies", actually from 2014, but still airing:



     Meanwhile, neighboring Wisconsin is airing this funny ad:

     Minnesota's Gov. Mark Dayton trashed Wisconsin tourism's effort calling it "one of the most idiotic ads I've ever seen in my life," and went on to joke that Minnesota should pay Wisconsin to keep the ads on the air.

"I'll write that on a piece of infrastructure and send it to Gov. Walker," Dayton said, a reference to the Wisconsin Republican governor's publicized act of minor vandalism against Minnesotans. In November, Walker wrote "Go Packers" on a piece of Wisconsin steel bound for the new Minnesota Vikings stadium.

Of course, Michigan, majestically above the fray of any snarky tit-for-tat, continues to run the classiest, most beautifully evocative tourism ads in its Pure Michigan campaign of any of the USA's most viciously homophobic northern states:

Apple's boss rips privacy intrusions of Facebook, Google

Without directly naming them, Apple's boss, Tim Cook has contrasted his company with those who “have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information... They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be... Apple doesn't want your data.”
     Cook was in D.C. to receive a Champions of Freedom award from the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

     Cook took special aim at Google's new Photos service, which, according to TechCrunch, has been assailed by critics who say allow the company to analyze images of family life in order to optimize its advertising:
     “We don’t think you should ever have to trade it [privacy] for a service you think is free but actually comes at a very high cost. This is especially true now that we’re storing data about our health, our finances and our homes on our devices.” 
     “You might like these so-called free services, but we don’t think they’re worth having your email, your search history and now even your family photos data mined and sold off for God-knows-what advertising purpose,” Cook said. “We think some day, customers will see this for what it is.”

Apple's pugnacious defense of its customers' right to encrypt their data, via TechCrunch:

By many accounts, Photos is a fantastic product, but even early on people have begun to point out the obvious tradeoff that you’re making when you sign up...
     Cook then switched gears to talk about encryption — directly addressing the efforts by policy makers to force Apple to offer a ‘master key’ that would allow government agencies access to consumer devices.
     “There’s another attack on our civil liberties that we see heating up every day — it’s the battle over encryption. Some in Washington are hoping to undermine the ability of ordinary citizens to encrypt their data,” said Cook.
     “We think this is incredibly dangerous. We’ve been offering encryption tools in our products for years, and we’re going to stay on that path. We think it’s a critical feature for our customers who want to keep their data secure. For years we’ve offered encryption services like iMessage and FaceTime because we believe the contents of your text messages and your video chats is none of our business.”
     The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been waging a war on “pervasive encryption,” painting it as an enabler of terrorism. Every security researcher and logical human being on the planet understands that this is ridiculous. And Cook is one of them.

     “If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too. Criminals are using every technology tool at their disposal to hack into people’s accounts. If they know there’s a key hidden somewhere, they won’t stop until they find it,” Cook continued.

     “Removing encryption tools from our products altogether, as some in Washington would like us to do, would only hurt law-abiding citizens who rely on us to protect their data. The bad guys will still encrypt; it’s easy to do and readily available.”

LeavenworthSt blog's 'Streetsweeper' uses antigay gutter epithet to describe straight-married John Oliver

"StreetSweeper" as
depicted on
LeavenworthSt blog

Although the Wiki page of HBO's popular political commenter, John Oliver, describes him (as of 2010, at least) as married to wife Kate Norley, an Iraq War veteran who served as a US Army medic, you shouldn't take that as gospel, as Wiki is rife with error.
     You could instead (especially if you're a Nebraska Republican) take the crude speculation of LeavenworthSt blog's founder, Streetsweeper (AKA Jerry Kratochvil) about Oliver's real sexual proclivities.
     Naturally, we at AKSARBENT don't take any of this snarky, contempt-speech personally. We've been called worse by better looking guys than Kratochvil at any number of gay bars. Details more or less similar to this.
     Maybe Jerry (an Omaha expat who covers right wing machinations here in River City from his home in Overland Park, Kansas) is planning a run at (no homo) Pat McPherson to relieve him of his seat on the State Board of Education and is therefore just giving his readers (if not the advertisers he now courts) what they really want.
     Well, except for his closeted, self-hating readers, but their silence in the face of a gratuitous slur or two is all part of the conservative game, isn't it?
     Remember, kids, Pat McPherson also ran a homophobic blog popular among Cornhusker cons and look where he is now!

Update: Below is the twitter exchange which followed the publication of the above post (now expanded and revised), for your edification, dear readers:



The above is what condescending, laid-back antagonists do when their animus occasionally bubbles to the surface, and someone actually calls them on it. A guide:

1) They disown said animus and insist that their target owns it (i.e., straight epithets are really gay slang!)
2) They suavely imply that it's all beneath them (Well, I'm not really up on these new, hip slurs that have been around since before I was born! Maybe I mistook them for terms of grudging affection? Kids today!)
3) They sportingly (or snidely) congratulate the person (Congrats!) who noticed what they wrote at their own damn leisure, as if graciously acknowledging a gotcha at a debate.
4) Finally, they blame someone else (like cretinous 90s GOP hipster P.J. O'Rourke) by citing their use of said slur as if that confers any legitimacy at all. (As in: Oh, you want ME to actually check the meanings of smears I borrow to make sure they're not class-based insults? This is liberal PC run amok!)

AP: FBI operates 115-plane city surveillance air force registered to at least 13 fake companies

FBI spokesman Christopher Allen insisted that the FBI aviation program is not secret but asked the Associated Press not to publish the names of the phony firms it discovered, saying the expense of creating new cover companies to hid the government's involvement that would saddle taxpayers with more costs. This is a big investigation by the Associated Press capped by an unusually long article which you may find here.

     Some of the aircraft can also be equipped with technology that can identify thousands of people below through the cellphones they carry, even if they're not making a call or in public. Officials said that practice, which mimics cell towers into coughing up basic subscriber information, is rare.
     Details confirmed by the FBI track closely with published reports since at least 2003 that a government surveillance program might be behind suspicious-looking planes slowly circling neighborhoods. The AP traced at least 50 aircraft back to the FBI, and identified more than 100 flights since late April orbiting both major cities and rural areas.
     ...A federal budget document from 2010 mentioned at least 115 planes, including 90 Cessna aircraft, in the FBI's surveillance fleet.
     ...The surveillance flights comply with agency rules, an FBI spokesman said. Those rules... are heavily redacted in publicly available documents...
     ...Officials say cellphone surveillance is rare, although the AP found in recent weeks FBI flights orbiting large, enclosed buildings for extended periods where aerial photography would be less effective than electronic signals collection. Those included above Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota.
     ...At least 13 front companies that AP identified being actively used by the FBI are registered to post office boxes in Bristow, Virginia, which is near a regional airport used for private and charter flights.     Only one of them appears in state business records.

MSNBC: 'Nebraska, have you hired a [drug] mule?'

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts

Pete Ricketts evidently cannot grasp the meaning of  "illegally importing drugs" as he continues his quest to score unapproved, embargoed execution drugs from India (cost: $54,000) even after the state's Unicameral outlawed the death penalty over his dead veto and even after the DEA confiscated execution drugs four years ago when Dave Heineman and Jon Bruning tried the same ploy.
     Ricketts is making himself — and the state — the laughingstock of two national television networks: first HBO and now MSNBC, whose Rachel Maddow sarcastically asked last night: "Nebraska, have you hired a [drug] mule?"

NE Gov. Ricketts now the laughingstock of HBO's John Oliver: 'a dollar store Lex Luther'

Also: Rachel Maddow covered Ricketts's continued shenanigans on her show, too.

Last week, the Unicameral revoked Pete Ricketts's license to kill when it overrode his veto of the legislature's death penalty repeal.
     Ricketts's stubbornly arrogant refusal to accept the second of two anti-death-penalty votes is now taking the form of the continuation of his expensive, doomed quest to score illegal execution drugs that the FDA says can't be imported into this country.
     Apparently Ricketts learned nothing from the fact that the DEA confiscated execution drugs four years ago when Gov. Dave Heineman and Attorney General Jon Bruning team tried the same trick — from the same shady Indian supplier. From John Oliver:

So he's essentially saying: "Hey guys, great news! I found the murder drugs that I've been looking for! Good News! I found a way to get the murder drugs!" How is that good news, you unpeeled hard-boiled egg with teeth?

...That is pathetic. Because saying that you have access to high-quality drugs from India and then not being able to deliver is embarrasing enough when you're a high school junior trying to get into your prom date's pants. It is downright humiliating when you are the adult governor of a state trying to desperately kill people, you dollar-store Lex Luther."

Other HBO synonyms for Pete Ricketts:

• "Their governor, an enormous Human Thumb, Pete Ricketts"
• "You giant shaved owl"
• "You unpeeled hard-boiled egg with teeth"

WIRED: U.S. tried to sabotage N. Korea nuke program with Israeli Stuxnet worm, but failed

From WIRED:

     The targeted machines in Iran, like those in North Korea, are not connected to the internet. So the attackers had to devise ways to get the weapon onto those air-gapped machines. They did so by infecting five Iranian companies that are in the business of installing Siemens and other brands of industrial control systems at Natanz and other facilities throughout Iran. The attackers targeted these companies with the hope that contractors working at Natanz would carry the weapon into the well-guarded facility.
     While the plan worked beautifully in Iran, it ultimately hit a snafu against North Korea where the nuclear program is even more tightly controlled than Iran’s and where few computers—belonging to contractors or anyone else—are online and accessible via the internet.

15,000 right- and left-wing web sites block Congress to protest illegal NSA domestic surveillance

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum told NBC news he doesn't think the NSA and other agencies have abused the Patriot Act, up for reauthoriza­tion. The author of that law disagrees. The code that  blocks congressional IP addresses from accessing your website is below. Click the "How It Works" graphic to read the HTML code and copy it (Exactly! — no typos) into your website, if you wish.

HRC revisits Rick Santorum's repeated attacks on LGBTs

The clip about Rick Santorum's justification of his hostility toward LGBTs by citing his Catholicism reminded us of the recently concluded Unicameral session during which the Catholic hierarchy orchestrated a cut-and-paste email campaign against an LGBT employment bill outlawing bias but did not similarly lobby against the death penalty.

Bombshell: Rachel Maddow exposes squalid saga of Nebraska's attempt to score illegal execution drugs

It turns out that the DEA confiscated illegally-acquired execution drugs four years ago during the Heineman/Bruning regime and now the Ricketts/Peterson team is doing the same thing again — on the taxpayer's dime.
     The emails Maddow used to bust this latest GOP chicanery came from a public records request by the Nebraska ACLU.
     In researching this story Maddow discovered that two other as-yet unnamed states are trying the same ploy. Public records requests are now underway across the country to find out which states those are.
     Even the Omaha Police Union is helping to mislead the public about the probable success (nil) of this appalling endeavor.

Nikon very proud of its new "monocoque" camera

Above: screen shot composite from
two Nikon D750 promotional videos.

The Nikon D750 is Popular Photography's Camera of the Year for 2014, flare issues notwithstanding.
     Its body is a hybrid of magnesium alloy (top and back) and carbon fiber (rest of the camera), but it's OK with Nikon if you just call it "monocoque" because that's what they call it.
     Camera seller Digital Rev's snarky, irreverent reviewer, Kai W., noted that relative to the D810 and D610, the D750 is "kind of like a weird hybrid." (Referring to the camera's autofocus system, not the body).
     To illustrate this not-hard-to-grasp concept to Digital Rev's 500,000 subscribers, Kai had a buddy/model wear a skirt, er "hipster dress," commenting, "You're not quite there. You haven't gone, like, full lady-like... one ass cheek's lady, one ass cheek's dude."
     After those comments, we're guessing Digital Rev isn't being swamped with D750 orders from transgender photographers — even after assurances that cameras sold as new by the company are no longer repackaged after having been used for promotional shoots done on a really hot day:

     "Then I found other photos DigitalRev had taken with my camera, before it dawned on me that the images were actually from product reviews by DigitalRev TV."
     "When I watched the reviews, I saw that my camera was being used as part of their production equipment." To make matters even worse, the presenter handling the camera was featured complaining about being “particularly sweaty and odorous” that day and even wiped himself down with a feminine hygiene product.
     He also put his hands down his pants before using the camera again."

MSNBC: widely-reported gay marriage study may be bogus

UCLA grad student Michael LaCour's coauthor, Donald Green, has requested a retraction by the journal Science of their paper after LaCour's lawyer admitted that his client lied. The study claimed that short conversations by canvassers about gay marriage could change the views of people on the issue.

     The journal Science said it was looking into the allegations. In the meantime, it published an "Editorial Expression of Concern" to alert readers to the fact that the paper might be bogus.
     The study — which was picked up by many media outlets — claimed a 20-minute conversation with a gay canvasser produced a big change in attitudes toward same-sex marriage, and that the shift in thinking could last for nine months.
     The Stanford researchers said that when they contacted the survey firm LaCour supposedly used, it knew nothing about the project and they discovered the staffer they thought had carried out the work didn't even exist.
     Green said that when LaCour was confronted, he refused to turn over contact information for the survey respondents and claimed the raw data had been accidentally deleted.
     LaCour's lawyer has confirmed two false statements in the published study: that survey respondents were given cash incentives to participate, and that funding was provided by a number of well-known non-profits.

Nebraska ranked 8th-worst state for LGBTs

Source: Movement Advancement Project

Even if the US Supreme Court ruled Nebraska's constitutional ban of gay marriage, civil unions and domestic partnerships uncon­stitutional, the state would still be among those which offer no statewide protection to LGBTs from being fired from their jobs, kicked out of their homes, or denied access to doctor’s offices and restaurant, or having their children protected from discrimination in school for having LGBT parents. And Nebraska would still permit parents to subject their children to harmful and discredited "conversion therapy.”
     Possibly related: Omaha's Gay Day parade will be held in another state this June for the third consecutive year.

Broadway/sitcom star Andrew Rannells recounts growing up gay in Omaha

AKSARBENT has done several posts about Rannells (here, here and here), but the best one was about him holding up a WOWT6 mug on Seth Meyers while discussing a scene in which he received  gave a hand job from> to another (male) actor (also from Omaha—Yay!)  in a scene from Girls. Although local TV loves to regurgitate network shoutouts, WOWT was strangely silent about this. Mute, even.

Satire: The Duggars explain their little PR problem

It's an ill wind that blows nobody some good: Today the New York Times is reporting that 20 sponsors of TLC's 19 Kis and Counting have bailed; meanwhile huge advertisers are reportedly "fed up" with rampant FIFA corruption.

The Duggars Respond To Sexual Abuse Scandal from Funny Or Die

Religious Freedom explained by Betty Bowers, America's best Christian!

Senators Beau McCoy, Mike Groene, Joni Craighead, Lydia Brasch, Bill Kintner, David Schnoor, Dave Bloomfield and Omaha's Roman Catholic Archdiocese understand this very well. Now you can too!

By repackaging prejudice as liberty, religious freedom is a magical back door to that happier time before civil rights. Because it's not prejudice if you call it religion!

Throwback Thursday: Etienne Daho — Tombé pour la France

I heard this 1986 European hit once in Lincoln back in the late 80s on a local show on KUCV and found it twenty years later on YouTube.

GOP Gov. Ricketts' execution drug con falls apart: FDA says he won't get the death penalty drugs you paid for

Gov. Ricketts' game of execution brinkmanship failed today. Following last week's 32-vote approval of a death penalty repeal, he promised a veto and strong-armed GOP senators in the Unicameral to get his way.
     One of the ploys, aside from lowballing or ignoring the cost of death sentence appeals in dozens of interviews, was to assure senators that he had solved the state's illegal execution drug problem by purchasing, with your taxes, over $50,000 worth of Kevorkian juice from India.
     But the FDA has something to say about that: Ricketts isn't going to get his poison anytime soon.
     Ricketts did manage to pick up a vote from Tyson Larson, who abstained in the LB283 vote last week but said that after today's vote to sustain the Gov.'s veto, he is ready to wash his hands of the whole death penalty business.,
     In the end Ricketts only flipped two senators: Jerry Johnson and John Murante, who, finger to the wind, actually blamed his opportunistic, too-clever-by-half flip-flop on the voters in his district lobbying him first one way, then the other. What's a spineless politician supposed to do in the face of that, huh? Larson notwithstanding, flipping two senators wasn't enough as it still left 30, just enough to override Ricketts' veto.

NE Unicameral overrides GOP Gov. veto of death penalty abolition with no spare votes; how they voted

Click to enlage

Live, now: NE debates whether to override Gov. Ricketts' veto of death penalty abolition

Our entries so far...

#MakeAMovieLazy The Prime of Remiss Jean Brodie A Hard Day's Nighty Night Beautyrest and the Beast Late Sleeper

— AKSARBENT blog (@aksarbent) May 27, 2015

Iona Institute patron says American money bought Irish gay marriage referendum

Her Wiki page says:

     "O'Brien is a patron of the Iona Institute, a conservative Catholic pressure group, and appears regularly in the Irish media as a contributor, supporting the teachings of the Catholic Church.
     In her Irish Times column, she has expressed her opposition to abortion in all circumstances, including rape, incest and fatal foetal abnormality, and to same-sex marriage.
     Her stance on civil partnerships has changed. Initially opposed to them in 2008, and 2010 by 2015, in the run up to the Irish marriage equality referendum, she claimed to be in support of them.

     In 2015, The Independent reported O'Brien's opinion that gay couples, then prohibited from marrying, should abstain from sex like unmarried straight couples.
     Here's what O'Brien said just before the Irish referendum about the funding of the pro-marriage equality opposition:

According to Atlantic, GLEN [The Gay and Lesbian Equality Network] received $4,727,860 between 2005 and 2011.

     Yes, four and three quarter million dollars. (Incidentally, GLEN explained to The Irish Times in 2013 that it gets only half its funding from Atlantic.)

     In 2009, GLEN had 348 media appearances – 179 broadcasts and the rest ranged from national newspapers to the Law Society Gazette. Almost one per day.

     Let’s not forget Marriage Equality, whose name even ended up on the referendum ballot paper. They got a mere $475,215 from Atlantic.

     ...Oh, and the other part of Yes Equality, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL)? From 2001 to 2010, it got $7,727,700 and another $3,829,693 in 2010 and 2013.

      ...This is not Atlantic Philanthropies funding a hospital or school. This is foreign money being systematically invested to change public opinion, to deliver seamlessly a Yes in a referendum that has enormous consequences for family law for generations.

     All the while soothing us by spinning it as just “seventeen little words”. Can American money buy an Irish referendum?

Five hit songs with gay subtexts we didn't see coming

Hold Tight — Andrews Sisters
This 1939 hit was recorded by the original American female supergroup (sorry to all you who think that phenomenon started with the Supremes—who once traded songs with the Andrews Sisters because Sammy Davis Jr., made them do it, and trust us, you haven't lived until you hear the Supremes sing the Roll Out The Barrel polka.)
     The suggestiveness of the Hold Tight lyrics, it turns out, were well known at the time; several radio stations banned the song, which was called "obscene" by columnist Walter Winchel. Some say the song is a Harlem anthem to cruising the docks for sailors ("seafood"); others say "Hold Tight" was lesbian code in WWII.
     The below recording is a treat. In the 60s, the Andrews Sisters re-recorded some of their greatest hits for DOT records in stereo with terrific arrangements; song after song turned out better than the original Andrews Sisters recordings.



Jaded Lover —  Jerry Jeff Walker.
Walker (real name: Ronald Clyde Crosby) didn't write this (Zen Cowboy Chuck Pyle did) but liner notes quoting Walker about the generalized nature of the song pretty clearly indicate he knew what it really was about — or might have been about; he performed it before country music audiences anyway. The song has no female or male pronouns and the drama queen refrain is barely subterranean at all.

I can see you are an angel, whose wings just won't unfold...
Goodbye you jaded lover, you undercover queen for a day...
Well, keep sittin' on it darlin'...

I Think I Love You — Partridge Family 
This was the biggest surprise to us when we started compiling this short list, as we have heard it a million times without thinking about a queer subtext that was hiding in plain sight. Nothing else better explains the following lyrics by Tony Romeo, who must have been gay himself because the Internet Hive says so and we don't mess with hives.

This morning,
I woke up with this feeling
I didn't know how to deal with,
And so I just decided to myself,
I'd hide it to myself.
And never talk about it.
And didn't I go and shout it
When you walked into the room!
...I think I love you.
So what am I so afraid of?
I'm afraid that I'm not sure of
A love there is no cure for.

Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps — Doris Day
We always thought Doris Day was singing about a man who was just teasing her by jerking the chain — not one who was aiming at greener pastures by trying to escape the yard altogether. Then we read about Ang Lee specifically choosing this song for the alley scene in Brokeback Mountain (no, not Ennis's alley scene, stupid — Jack's) and realized that pop culture was trying to tell us something but we weren't listening. For Pete's sake, Doris Day got a gold record for singing the Gayest Song In The History Of Western Pop Music, Secret Love (presented to her on What's My Line?, trivia addicts), so what was to stop her from trying to repeat the feat? We ARE open to the suggestion that this song (a Spanish-language hit before it was an English one) was really straight but repurposed when sung by a woman — unless she was singing it to another woman. Hmmm. Oh geez, we're getting confused again; let's move on.



You've Got To Hide Your Love Away — The Beatles
    Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know. How could anyone not see this coming when all you need to is read the title, huh? Well, we missed it because it is a Beatles song and the Beatles didn't do gay songs.
     We were still suspicious, even after having been told it was about the Beatles' famously closeted manager, Brian Epstein, who (John Lennon, back when he was pathologically bitchy, mocked Epstein once by deliberately mangling the articulation of Epstein's autobiography A Cellarful of Noise, calling it "A Cellarful of Boys."
     Anyway, ever since we heard that in the Beatles' Anthology film, You've Got To Hide Your Love Away plays in the background during a discussion of Epstein, we became more sympathetic to the notion of a deliberate gay theme in this Lennon-McCartney song actually written by John Lennon.
Here's Eddie Vedder's rendition, just because we're tired of the excerpt from Help!:

Goat wants a fag. GIMME A FAG!

As we're sure you've already guessed if you didn't know in the first place, "fag" has more meanings across the pond than it does here in the USA.

Germaine Greer on Ireland's gay marriage referendum

Greer also read Jane Fonda the riot act.

 "In Ireland, you still can't get a pregnancy terminated. I don't think you can even get a morning after pill. But they've got single-sex marriage. Didn't they skip a beat there?