Posts made by leatherbear

Coming out is hard to do. Most things worth doing are. The first step, being honest with yourself about your sexuality, is often the hardest. But once you do that, your closet's nature changes from denial to deception. And there are fewer and fewer excuses today for staying there.

The gay community is more public and more widely available today than ever before. There are major gay characters in Hollywood movies and on television. Stars like Neil Patrick Harris and Ellen DeGeneres have come out and thrived. A simple search on the Internet pulls up endless information on gay people, gay groups, gay charities, gay rights, gay products, gay cruises, gay cruising, gay porn. Many countries in the world permit full-on gay marriage, and America is finally catching up. The President of the United States made an "It Gets Better" video.

None of this support was there for me in the 1980s, growing up in what was then the Soviet Union. I'm living proof that homosexuality is born, not bred. I knew nothing about gay people when I was a kid: everyone around me – and everything I saw and heard in the media and on the streets -- was straight. But I instinctively understood that I was different from other boys. Neither my classmates nor I had a word for what I was, but we knew what I was not: one of them.

Somewhere between the ages of 12 and 14, I figured out that I wasn't sexually interested in girls but in guys, and I learned that this attraction was called homosexuality, and that it was a shameful and perverse disease that could land me in jail for years if I acted on it. I tried to fight it within myself. I tried to fantasize about women. I tried not to look at men.

I was lonely, and I was terrified. I looked for escape in the arts, and I remember going to a ballet alone at the age of 15. At intermission, a young man came over to me and sat down. As we talked about the performance, his leg began to rub just slightly against my own. I jumped up and ran out of the theater; my heart was pounding with horror. This guy had recognized the homosexual in me. He could see that I was one of them. I was devastated.

Relief for me finally came, ironically, in the form of a hateful propaganda piece in a Soviet newspaper. The article's point was that the West was being destroyed by its tolerance of homosexuality. That was ridiculous, of course -- that was during the Reagan years -- but the article opened my eyes to a whole world of gay life that I hadn't known existed. In the West, gay people were common!

I began to embrace my sexuality and found freedom in it. I no longer wanted to hide. I came out to my parents, my grandparents, my brother -- all of my relatives, in fact, even though my parents asked me not to. I was a gay man now, not a scared boy, and I wanted to tell the world. I left Russia when I could and, a few years later, moved to America -- where I was surprised to find so many closets still in place.

Some people have no choice in the matter, at least at work: in many parts of the country, it is legal to fire someone for being gay. But it is embarrassing that many gay Americans still lie needlessly about themselves to their friends, coworkers and families. It's shameful that older gay men and women who have been closeted all their lives continue being closeted out of inertia, and it's sad that younger gay men and women create fake lives instead of embracing who they are.

I am furious at closeted politicians who try to push back gay rights, like certain Republican congressmen. I am furious at celebrities and those with prominent positions in the media who live in glass closets and enjoy the fruits of gay achievements won by braver people in harder times.

And appearances do matter -- public appearances, the kind that a confused and lonely kid in Russia or Kansas or your neighborhood might see. "It gets better" is a nice but passive sentiment; it's not enough. Courage is contagious: Come out, go out and help make it better.

Today, October 11, is National Coming Out Day — the internationally observed day to celebrate coming out and to raise awareness of the LGBT community and LGBT civil rights movement.

National Coming Out Day was founded in 1988 by Robert Eichberg, a psychologist from New Mexico, and Jean O’Leary, an openly gay political leader from Los Angeles, on behalf of the personal growth workshop, “The Experience and National Gay Rights Advocates.”

The date of October 11 coincides with the anniversary of the 1987 National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

In addition to the United States, National Coming Out Day is also observed in many countries, including Australia, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Croatia, and Poland. In the United Kingdom, National Coming Out Day is celebrated on October 12.

We Need to Fight Back

Elton John and Johann Hari

There has been a strange hole in Western gay politics – until now. We have, understandably, been focused on our own national battles for dignity: to get married, and not get fired for being gay, or bullied into despair as teenagers. But while we were starting to win, millions of gay people were starting to lose -- and lose badly. There are seven countries where the punishment for homosexuality is death, and the number is growing. In dozens more, gay people are being terrorized into the closet, or a prison cell, or the hands of a lynch mob, today, now. To pluck one example at random, this summer, a senior official in Ghana ordered gays and lesbians "rounded up", and announced: "All efforts are being made to get rid of these people." Imagine a thousand Matthew Shephards, lynched with the approval of the state.

These hunted gay people are asking for our help -- and now, at last, organizations are being built to get it to them. This is the new prong to the fight for gay equality, and perhaps the most crucial.

In every human society ever recorded, some people -- around 3 to 5 percent -- have been sexually drawn to their own gender. It is as universal and as harmless a quirk as left-handedness. Yet somewhere along the way, a whole cluster of fears and paranoias furred around homosexuality. There were myths that gay people were subversives or pedophiles or enemies of an invisible deity. For a long time, these myths killed gay men and women in our societies -- and now they are killing people just like us in swelling numbers abroad.

David Kato was a school headteacher in rural Uganda, described by one of his friends as "a small, thin man, with spare hair and dark skin. It was always the eyes that held you: wild and staring, possessed, passionate. And the voice: high and stubborn, insistent on having his own way." He grew up in a society, Uganda, where he was told there was nobody with his natural urges - and if such a freak did arise, he would be jailed or lynched at once. But gradually he began to realize "I didn't know anyone [gay] but I knew there were people there" – so he took a step nobody had ever taken before in Uganda. He called a press conference and announced he was forming a group for gay Ugandans, asking to be left alone to live their lives.

Not long after, a newspaper put him and a few other gay people on its front page, claiming they were recruiting children, under the headline: "Hang Them." Somebody took the hint: Kato was beaten to death with a hammer. But even death wasn't a release. At his funeral, the presiding pastor raged that the gays present would "be punished by God" unless they repented.

Among some people, there is an unspoken assumption that gay equality inches forward of its own accord -- but in many countries, the situation is dramatically deteriorating for gay people. In Uganda, to name just one, there has been an attempt to reimpose the death penalty that has not yet been conclusively defeated. Campaigners on the ground warn that if the international pressure lets up, it will be reintroduced into parliament very quickly, and pass.

This doesn't have to happen. None of this is fixed by nature. It's patronizing and false to claim that poor countries are inevitably homophobic: in 2007, Nepal -- a bitterly poor country -- introduced binding legal protections for gay people. It's equally patronizing to think that intensely religious countries are inevitably homophobic. Argentina is highly Catholic, but has legalized gay marriage. In the US and Europe, we have shown in just a few lifetimes how deeply homophobic cultures can be transformed. In the year one of us -- Elton -- was born, it was a crime to be gay in Britain, but I survived through the battles to see the day when I could have a civil partnership and a son and be accepted by all but a small circle of bigoted hold-outs.

It didn't happen by magic. It happened because gay people organized and stood together and appealed to the decency and empathy of the heterosexual majority. People like David Kato are trying to do that -- and they need our support.

But there have been few organizations systematically getting help to them. The big human rights organizations, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, have done some incredibly valuable work on individual countries, but nobody is even compiling a list of who across the world is in prison or designated for death just for being gay. What are their names? What are their stories? What support do they want?

Until now. A remarkable group called Kaleidoscope has been set up in London, with global reach and a simple goal. Any gay person running for her life, or any gay group banding together to be treated like a human being, will be given the support they need, in the way they want it. Do they want quiet diplomatic pressure on their governments? Do they want computers? Do they want to be smuggled out? Do they want prominent gays to visit the country and sit in the courtrooms with them? What do they need?

Earlier this year, we were shown how far a little bit of international solidarity can go in preventing homocide. In Malawi, a young gay couple -- a 26-year-old and a 20-year-old -- were sentenced to fourteen years' hard labor, just for having consensual sex. It took a small amount of pressure from gay people in Europe on their governments, and then a small amount of pressure by our governments on Malawi, for them to cave in and release the couple. There is a lever here.

But so far, most of the pressure flowing from the US and Europe has been in the other direction -- supporting the murderous homophobes. A battalion of US evangelicals flooded Uganda prior to the move to reintroduce the death penalty for homosexuality, announcing that homosexuality can be "cured", and gays were determined to recruit African children. For example, the Atlantic Monthly has revealed that one of Michele Bachmann's closest advisors, Peter Waldron, is a close personal friend of the man who most aggressively promoted the bill to hunt down and kill all of Uganda's gays.

His name is Pastor Martin Ssempa. He is fond of convening press conferences where he displays pictures of men covered in feces. He announced: "I want to say homosexuals eat each other's poop. Homosexuals stick their hands into their rectums... This man has just eaten the other person's poo poo and is rubbing it into his mouth." He says "fisting [is] practiced by 65 percent of all homosexuals. It is deviant! As if that is not enough, he [the typical gay man] puts it all the way iiiiiin!" Would Bachmann retain an advisor whose friends talked about, say, Jews in this grotesque way?

Yet Bachmann's advisor has not done anything to distance himself from this crazed hatred. On the contrary: we now know that Michele Bachmann's husband, Marcus, teaches and preaches the central idea behind the movements to hunt down gay people across the world: that homosexuality is a choice, and so gay people who persist with their sexuality are being willfully deviant. Only last week, Herman Cain similarly insisted on The View that homosexuality is a choice – a fact that is contradicted by overwhelming scientific evidence. These ideas have consequences.

Do the people who put forward this argument realize what they are confessing about their own sexuality? We couldn't be straight, no matter how hard we tried. If Cain or Bachmann or Ssempa are saying they "chose" to be straight, and could have chosen otherwise, they can only be confessing to repressed bisexuality -- and projecting it outwards onto everybody else. If you "chose" your heterosexuality, then you are not entirely heterosexual.

There is a global war going on against the right of an entire group to fall in love. The US hard right is aiding the side of the persecutors and bigots. We need to aid the side of the people who want to live and love. That is the goal of Kaleidoscope. It will carry out its work sensitively, guided by the help gay people in the group want. The murderous homophobes want to claim that homosexuality is an "imperialist" or "alien" import -- so it is crucial that we don't play into their hands. This is a fight that needs to be lead by local people. But we can offer real support and solidarity -- just as the fight against Apartheid was led within South Africa, but supported across the globe.

This doesn't detract for a second from the urgent fight for equality back at home. We can do both. And this isn't just a fight for gay people. One of the most moving aspects of the struggle for gay equality here has been how many heterosexual people have been at its forefront. Indeed, two of the most eloquent enemies of homophobia in the world today are Archbishop Desmond Tutu, an African man, and Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian woman. Tutu says: "If God, as they say, is homophobic, I wouldn't worship that God."

We know what will happen if we do nothing, and if Kaleidoscope doesn't attract the supporters it needs. It's encapsulated in the story of a young Senegalese man called Bassirou, whose story is told in the Human Rights Watch report 'Fear For Life.' Their team met him as a thirty-year-old man, soon after a local newspaper found out he was gay and concocted a grotesque story that he was a pedophile grooming children. Bassirou ran to his home but his brother came after him with a big stick, and said he would kill him if he ever came back. He ran away to another town and got a job manufacturing plastics, but they found out he was gay and fired him. He said in 2004: "I don't go out. I don't talk to anyone. I don't interact with my neighbors... I go home very, very late at night so that no one will see me... I tell myself, I'll die one day [because of this]. Sometimes I'm very scared." Not long after, he was living on the streets, fell sick, and died.

This doesn't have to happen ever again. On June 28th, 1969, the police famously raided the Stonewall Inn and beat up the people there, just for being gay. Imagine if you had stood in the Stonewall Inn that night and said – forty-two years from now, on these streets, they will be celebrating the introduction of gay marriage. There will be openly gay cops and politicians and lawyers kissing on the streets across the city, and the people who think you are sick will be the ones regarded as freaks. It would have seemed like the most absurd science fiction -- but it happened. It happened in the lifetime of many of the people who were in the Stonewall Inn that night. They lived to see it. And if Kaleidoscope attracts the support they deserve, we believe we will live to see the day when gay people are able to embrace openly on the streets of Kampala and Kingston and Kandahar. Grab your jacket and your instinct for justice -- the global Stonewall riot has begun.

:cheers:

By Brody Levesque

Bullying and anti-gay violence are by far the worst legacy arising from the falsehoods spread by the Family Research Council (FRC) and the American Family Association (AFA), according to a new intelligence report by the Southern Poverty Law Center that examines two of the most powerful and influential organizations in the American anti-gay lobby.

The relentless public pronouncements by the combined leadership of the FRC and AFA — spreading myths portraying gay people as child molesters, deviants, and a threat to public health — have created an atmosphere where bullying, bashing, and demonizing appears to be quietly sanctioned by these groups as appropriate, said Mark Potok, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project.

While no-one in either the FRC or AFA has advocated acts of violence against LGBTQ persons, the non-stop propaganda machine of these two groups has fostered a societal environment whereby their narrow interpretation of their evangelical religious beliefs becomes the message “received and understood” by its recipients.

According to the SPLC, it is this environment which has unquestionably contributed directly to the increase in anti-gay violence in recent years.

In its report — titled “The Anti-Gay Lobby: The Family Research Council, the American Family Association and the Demonization of LGBT People” — the SPLC breaks down the ten most egregious myths that FRC and AFA utilize to demonize LGBT people.

In many cases, the promulgation of these myths often incite gay persons to seek a “cure” for their sexual orientation through dangerous therapeutic practices, or worse, commit suicide in a desperate attempt to escape the bullying and its effects.

These myths are “fairy tales” that are important to the anti-gay lobby because they form the basis of their claim that homosexuality is a social evil that must be suppressed, Potok told LGBTQ Nation. “All based on the anti-gay lobby’s dubious claim that homosexuality is a behavior, a choice — an opinion that has been rejected by virtually all relevant medical and scientific authorities.”

Myth 1:
Gay men molest children at far higher rates than heterosexuals.

According to the SPLC, depicting gay men as a threat to children may be the single most potent weapon for stoking public fears about homosexuality — and for winning elections and referendums. Discredited psychologist Paul Cameron, the most ubiquitous purveyor of anti-gay junk science, has been a major promoter of this myth. Despite having been debunked repeatedly and very publicly, by professional physiological and psychiatric associations, Cameron’s work is still widely relied upon by anti-gay organizations, although many no longer quote him by name.

But according to the American Psychological Association, “homosexual men are not more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexual men are.” Gregory Herek, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who is one of the nation’s leading researchers on prejudice against sexual minorities, reviewed a series of studies and found no evidence that gay men molest children at higher rates than heterosexual men.

Myth 2:
Same-sex parents harm children.

Most hard-line anti-gay organizations are heavily invested, from both a religious and a political standpoint, in promoting the traditional nuclear family as the sole framework for the healthy upbringing of children.

However, no legitimate research has demonstrated that same-sex couples are any more or any less harmful to children than heterosexual couples. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics in a 2002 policy statement declared: “A growing body of scientific literature demonstrates that children who grow up with one or two gay and/or lesbian parents fare as well in emotional, cognitive, social, and sexual functioning as do children whose parents are heterosexual” and that the “psychological well-being of children is unrelated to parental sexual orientation.”

Myth 3:
People become gay because they were sexually abused as children or there was a deficiency in sex role modeling by their parents.

Many anti-gay rights proponents claim that homosexuality is a mental disorder caused by some psychological trauma or aberration in childhood. The argument is used to counter the common observation that no one, gay or straight, consciously chooses his or her sexual orientation.

Again, there has been no scientifically sound study has linked sexual orientation or identity with parental role-modeling or childhood sexual abuse. The American Psychiatric Association noted in a 2000 fact sheet on gay, lesbian and bisexual issues that “no specific psychosocial or family dynamic cause for homosexuality has been identified, including histories of childhood sexual abuse.”

Myth 4:
Gay men and lesbians don’t live nearly as long as heterosexuals.

Anti-gay organizations want to promote heterosexuality as the healthier “choice.” They assert that shorter life spans and poorer physical and mental health of gays and lesbians are often offered as reasons why they shouldn’t be allowed to adopt or foster children.

This falsehood can be traced directly to the discredited research of Cameron and his Family Research Institute, specifically a 1994 paper he co-wrote entitled, “The Lifespan of Homosexuals.” Using obituaries collected from gay newspapers, he and his two co-authors concluded that gay men died, on average, at 43, compared to an average life expectancy at the time of around 73 for all U.S. men.

Myth 5:
Gay men controlled the Nazi Party and helped to orchestrate the Holocaust.

This claim comes directly from a 1995 book titled The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams. Lively is the virulently anti-gay founder of Abiding Truth Ministries and Abrams is an organizer of a group called the International Committee for Holocaust Truth.

The Pink Swastika has been widely discredited by legitimate historians and scholars.

Myth 6:
Hate crime laws will lead to the jailing of pastors who criticize homosexuality and the legalization of practices like bestiality and necrophilia.

Anti-gay activists, who have long opposed adding LGBT people to those protected by hate crimes legislation, have repeatedly claimed that such laws would lead to the jailing of religious figures who preach against homosexuality — part of a bid to gain the backing of the broader religious community for their position.

The claim that hate crime laws could result in the imprisonment of those who “oppose the homosexual lifestyle” is false, says the SPLC. The Constitution provides robust protections of free speech, and case law makes it clear that even a preacher who suggested that gays and lesbians should be killed would be protected.

Myth 7:
Allowing gay people to serve openly will damage the armed forces.

Anti-gay groups have been adamantly opposed to allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the armed forces, not only because of their purported fear that combat readiness will be undermined, but because the military has long been considered the purest meritocracy in America.

The fact is that gays and lesbians have long served in the U.S. armed forces, though under the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy that governed the military between 1993 and September 2011, they could not serve openly.

At the same time, gays and lesbians have served openly for years in the armed forces of 25 countries, including Britain, Israel, South Africa, Canada and Australia. And according to a report by the Palm Center, a policy think tank at the University of California at Santa Barbara, lifting bans against openly gay service personnel in these countries has “had no negative impact on morale, recruitment, retention, readiness or overall combat effectiveness.”

Myth 8:
Gay people are more prone to be mentally ill and to abuse drugs and alcohol.

Anti-gay groups want not only to depict sexual orientation as something that can be changed, but also to show that heterosexuality is the more desirable “choice” — even if religious arguments are set aside.

The fact is that all major professional mental health organizations are on record as stating that homosexuality is not a mental disorder.

Myth 9:
No one is born gay.

Anti-gay activists keenly oppose the granting of “special” civil rights protections to gay people similar to those afforded Black Americans and other minorities. Because, if people are born gay — in the same way people have no choice as to whether they are black or white — discrimination against gay men and lesbians would be vastly more difficult to justify.

Thus, anti-gay forces insist that sexual orientation is a behavior that can be changed, not an immutable characteristic.

The fact is that modern science cannot state conclusively what causes sexual orientation, but a great many studies suggest that it is the result of biological and environmental forces, not a personal “choice.”

Myth 10:
Gay people can choose to leave homosexuality.

If people are not born gay, as anti-gay activists claim, then it should be possible for individuals to abandon homosexuality. This view is buttressed among religiously motivated anti-gay activists by the idea that homosexual practice is a sin and humans have the free will needed to reject sinful urges.

A number of “ex-gay” religious ministries have sprung up in recent years with the aim of teaching gay people to become heterosexuals, and these have become prime purveyors of the claim that gays and lesbians, with the aid of mental therapy and Christian teachings, can “come out of homosexuality.”

But “reparative,” or sexual re-orientation therapy — the pseudo-scientific foundation of the ex-gay movement — has been rejected by all the established and reputable American medical, psychological, psychiatric, and professional counseling organizations.

In 2009, for example, the American Psychological Association adopted a resolution, accompanied by a 138-page report, that repudiated ex-gay therapy. The report concluded that compelling evidence suggested that cases of individuals going from gay to straight were “rare” and that “many individuals continued to experience same-sex sexual attractions” after reparative therapy.

The APA resolution added that “there is insufficient evidence to support the use of psychological interventions to change sexual orientation” and asked “mental health professionals to avoid misrepresenting the efficacy of sexual orientation change efforts by promoting or promising change in sexual orientation.” The resolution also affirmed that same-sex sexual and romantic feelings are normal.

Reparative therapy is the SPLC’s next target.

According to Christine Sun, Deputy Legal Director of the SPLC, reparative therapy should be challenged legally, particularly as numerous and highly credible scientific and medical institutions and communities have labeled it “junk science.”

On Tuesday, October 11, the SPLC will launch a new awareness campaign aimed at allowing those who have suffered from the so-called “ex-gay therapy” to speak out and give them a platform to take action.

Sun said the SPLC wants these people to have the courage to take their story public and in many cases, take appropriate legal actions against the practitioners for the harm that has been caused.

Sun and Potok both vocalized a critical need for public officials, particularly public health officials and politicians to denounce reparative therapy practices which, Sun notes, are fueled by homophobia and fear.

It is the responsibility of adults to affirm young persons, and to “step-in and speak out” against this prejudiced junk science and the hateful rhetoric of the FRC and the AFA, said Potok.

In 2010, the SPLC designated both the FRC and AFA as “hate groups” for their “consistent pattern of spreading lies about LGBT persons.”

Warren Throckmorton, a respected professor and past president of the American Mental Health Counselors Association, wrote in December 2010: that “the newly labeled hate groups” were seeking to “avoid addressing the issues the SPLC raised, instead preferring to attack the credibility of the SPLC.”

Throckmorton said the SPLC’s list of myths propagated by the anti-gay religious-right groups, are “provably false” and “rooted in ignorance.”

Matthew Shepard

By Jamie McGonnigal

On October 7, 1998, Aaron Kreifels was riding his bike through a field in Wyoming.

He wasn’t expecting that day to be different from any other beautiful sunny afternoon in the vast plains surrounding Laramie, but that day would change many lives.

Aaron spotted what he initially thought was a scarecrow next to a fence. Then he noticed a glisten of blood. The sun sparkled on what he barely recognized as a face.

Aaron had discovered 22 year-old Matthew Shepard, clinging to life.

The young college student was viciously attacked and bludgeoned, and then tied to a fence and left to die. Matthew was targeted because he was gay.

Most of you know what happened next. Matthew held on for five more days and as his parents held his hand and prayed, Matthew slipped away quietly on October 12th, leaving in his wake a new movement for equality.

The outcries for justice and for greater protections were immediate and resonating.

Since then, Matthew’s mother Judy has made it her personal mission to protect all young LGBT people from Matthew’s horrific fate. In founding the Matthew Shepard Foundation, she has created safe spaces in and outside of schools for kids, and worked with parents to ensure their children learn to erase hate from their lives.

But overwhelmingly what you saw in 1998 was a community ready to act, ready to change something. And Matthew’s story was the catalyst for that.

Many of you have seen or read the Moises Kaufman play, The Laramie Project – Matthew’s story as told through interviews of those who were living in Laramie at the time – some of his friends and some who just happened to be riding a bike through the plains of Wyoming that day.

If you think of nothing else today, please consider the importance of telling your story – how your story can change the world around you.

This young man, unbeknownst to him, has changed the world with his.

Jamie McGonnigal is a gay rights activist and Co-Founder of Talk About Equality.

Guy Adams reports on growing alarm within the FBI about DiCaprio's portrayal of bureau boss and rumours of a gay kiss

Like any arm of the US government that employs large men who wear moustaches and carry handguns on their belt, the FBI boasts the most macho of official mottos: "Fidelity, Bravery and Integrity".

If Clint Eastwood has his way, the nation's cinemagoers may soon be given to wonder if a fourth (and very different) abstract noun ought to be added to that proudly held list: Homosexuality.

The veteran film director will next month release a movie called J Edgar, which is billed as an extravagant biopic of the bureau's co-founder and director for 37 years of the 20th century, John Edgar Hoover.

It stars Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, and a supporting cast that features Judi Dench and Naomi Watts. But that does not a hagiography make, and there are growing signs that the film will focus intently on suggestions that its supposedly conservative subject was in fact a closet gay.

Rumours about Hoover's close relationship with his aide Clyde Tolson have been circulating for years and are often explored by biographers. Outside the office, the duo, neither of whom married, were close lifelong friends, and frequently liked to holiday together.

When the great man died in 1972, the younger Tolson was named as his principal heir. And the two men chose to be buried within a few yards of each other, beneath the rolling lawns of the Congressional Cemetery in Washington DC. There are also reports, for now unsubstantiated, that both men privately enjoyed cross-dressing.

Historians are divided, however, as to whether they really were more than just friends. And admirers of Hoover – a right-leaning figure overly interested in the peccadillos of others, who supported some of the excesses of McCarthyism and was generally hostile to the civil rights movement – take great umbrage at those who cast aspersions as to his sexuality.

To that end, Mike Kortan, the FBI's assistant director, sent ripples of concern through his organisation last week when he revealed that both Eastwood and DiCaprio had sought information about Hoover's relationship with Tolson during briefings they were granted with officials from the bureau.

"We provided information so that their story could be accurate," he told USA Today. "What they did with it, as with any production, has been entirely in their hands."

Regarding the FBI's formal position on the matter, Mr Kortan added: "Vague rumours and fabrications have cropped up from time to time but there is no evidence in the historical record on this issue."

Behind the scenes, the forthcoming film appears to be the subject of growing controversy among the FBI rank and file. "There is no basis in fact for such a portrayal of Mr Hoover," William Branon, chairman of the J Edgar Hoover Foundation, is reported to have written in a letter to Eastwood: "It would be a grave injustice and monumental distortion to proceed with such a depiction, based on a completely unfounded and spurious assertion."

The Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI fired off a similar letter, according to USA Today, which first reported the controversy. That note said a "rumoured kissing scene", involving the actors portraying Hoover and Tolson, had "caused us to reassess our tacit approval of your film".

Eastwood replied in a joint letter with his producer Robert Lorenz. He said their film would give no "credence to cross-dressing allegations" and would not suggest that they were involved in an "open homosexual relationship".

However, it did not address the issue of whether the film would portray a closet homosexual relationship.

A synopsis says it will focus on "secrets" that Hoover hid "behind closed doors". But there is no indication as to whether those secrets concern such matters as his alleged links to the Mafia, or whether they involve matters of the flesh.

Intriguingly, Eastwood's screenwriter is Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for the gay rights film Milk. And the J Edgar trailer contains a suggestive image of DiCaprio, as Hoover, clutching the hand of Tolson, played by Armie Hammer.

William Baker, a former FBI agent and Hoover foundation vice-president, denied that concerns over the film were rooted in homophobia. "We're caught in a dilemma," he said. "We don't want to support something not based in fact, but we're not against the new FBI and diverse workplace."

One at a time 

Jerry Pittman Jr. and Dustin Lee show off their battle scars.
Jerry Pitman Jr. and partner Dustin Lee are making news this morning with the freshest take on ugly homophobic behavior that we’ve seen in a long time. The couple attempted to attend a church service at Grace Fellowship Church in Fruitland, Tennessee last Wednesday, but never quite made it inside – because the pastor ordered his congregation to attack the gay men.
“I went over to take the keys out of the ignition and all the sudden I hear someone say ‘sick’em,’” said Gibson County resident, Jerry Pittman Jr.
Pittman said the attacked was prompted by the pastor of the church, Jerry Pittman, his father.
“My uncle and two other deacons came over to the car per my dad’s request. My uncle smash me in the door as the other deacon knocked my boyfriend back so he couldn’t help me, punching him in his face and his chest. The other deacon came and hit me through my car window in my back,” said Pittman. He said bystanders did not offer assistance. He said the deacon yelled derogatory homosexual slurs, even after officers arrived. He said the officers never intervened to stop the deacons from yelling the slurs.

The deputy sheriff who arrived on scene refused to take a statement from the couple, even though they were the ones who has summoned the police. Without a statement reporting that an ugly incident of Christian mob violence had occurred, the officer on duty refused to press charges against the pastor or the violent deacons.
After an ABC News crew picked up the story and interviewed the Sheriff, the couple was permitted to finally press charges against Deacons Billy Sims, Eugene McCoy and Patrick Flatt along with Pastor Jerry Pittman.
It should come as absolutely n0 surprise that all of this went down in the Don’t Say Gay Bill state, Tennessee. It’s no wonder that the average Tennessean thinks this sort of behavior is acceptable after hearing his state legislators openly and aggressively demonizing LGBT people for much of the past year.
Tracy Morgan threatened to kill his son if he turns out to be gay on a Nashville stage this year. A Dollywood employee forced a lesbian woman to turn a marriage equality t-shirt inside out this summer. And a homophobic neighbor celebrated his lesbian neighbors’ anniversary by burning their home to the ground.
All of these incidents were made possible by the open disrespect and contempt the Tennessee legislature has for LGBT Americans. Let’s hope that these two young men actually receive a fair shot at justice here.
Worst father ever?

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — Governor Martin O’Malley is a Marylander for marriage equality.

The Democratic Governor on Monday released a video in which he called for balancing religious freedom with the freedom to marry.

“As a free and diverse people of many different faiths, we choose to be governed under the law by certain fundamental principles, among them, equal protection of the law for every individual and the free exercise of religion without government intervention,” O’Malley says in the video.

“The legislation we plan to introduce in the 2012 legislative session will protect religious freedom and equality of marital rights under the law,” he said.

O’Malley has said he wants marriage equality legislation approved in the Maryland legislature’s 2012 session, and that he would make it a priority of his administration.

The Governor told reporters in July that he would borrow elements of the strategy used by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) and marriage equality supporters in the Empire State to sponsor and pass a marriage equality bill in the session that begins in January.

O’Malley’s appearance marks the first advert sponsored by “Marylanders for Marriage Equality,” a coalition of groups working to pass the legislation.

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