Leaderboard

I was "out" at a very early age(I was 17 when I publicly came- and this was in the late 70's) I had been out to close friends and family for a few years before that) in a rather small town in NorCal. I was pretty much alone except for a couple of teachers who counseled and consoled me. Today I was in a Starbucks in this town and there were three young Gay boys (this Starbucks is across from the newish High School) were chatting rather campily when this very "straight"appearing Jock entered and joined them-holding the hand of one of the other boys. I had to sit in the car for a moment till the tears of joy dried so I could drive safely. All of the Gay Pride marches and rallies. all of the National Coming Out days, All of the "Visibility" events lead up to this. That two young fellas can feel free to hold hands in a public place in a small town if they feel like dong so. Part of my coming out publicly was a dramatic (SURPRISE!!!! ) reading of this piece by Armistead Maupin in my High School Speech class. http://www.sfgate.com/.../article/LETTER-TO-MAMA-2714157.php

.. if I had one might look something like this.

Oh, my. The whole Family is dotty about her. I wish I had a collection of shoes like that.

The perfect riposte. lookin... although I fear you may have given Hito a stroke.

Ask a silly question . . .

All that was before we discovered rimming.

A former soldier who showed up in a pink polo shirt at Michael Lucas' Hell's Kitchen studio ended up going to jail on September 12th after things got out of hand when he demanded to know why he was not getting more work. 28 year old Michael Caswell “...just stormed into our offices and started beating people up,” claimed [Michael] Lucas. “Several people locked themselves into the editing suite. You had to see his eyes the veins bulging on his forehead. It was scary.” (Gallo's bulging forehead not prominent here.) Gallo was charged with trespass, not assault, and ended up in jail, pink shirt and all. “It was a nightmare,” he said of the ordeal made no easier by his flamboyant attire. NY Post The Post further reports that happy ending may be in store for all: "The 28-year-old makes approximately $1500 per film and is a top model at the multimillion-dollar agency. We were using him all the time,” said Lucas. “He’s very popular, he’s very good looking and he’s one of my top four performers. We’d love him to return if he goes through very serious anger management and see a shrink.” So goes another day in the glamorous life of a male sex god. Caswell was honorably discharged from the Navy after he confessed his orientation to a navy chaplain in November of 2010 shortly before President Barack Obama ended Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. http://nypost.com/2013/10/21/jail-a-nightmare-for-gay-porn-guy-thrown-into-lockup-while-wearing-pink/ No doubt that Gallo still looks pretty in pink, but I couldn't find that shot!

P.S. A recipe for haggis... Ingredients 1 sheep stomach 1 sheep liver 1 sheep heart 1 sheep tongue 1/2 pound suet, minced 3 medium onions, minced 1/2 pound dry oats, toasted 1 teaspoon kosher salt 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper 1 teaspoon dried ground herbs Directions Rinse the stomach thoroughly and soak overnight in cold salted water. Rinse the liver, heart, and tongue. In a large pot of boiling, salted water, cook these parts over medium heat for 2 hours. Remove and mince. Remove any gristle or skin and discard. In a large bowl, combine the minced liver, heart, tongue, suet, onions, and toasted oats. Season with salt, pepper, and dried herbs. Moisten with some of the cooking water so the mixture binds. Remove the stomach from the cold salted water and fill 2/3 with the mixture. Sew or tie the stomach closed. Use a turning fork to pierce the stomach several times. This will prevent the haggis from bursting. In a large pot of boiling water, gently place the filled stomach, being careful not to splash. Cook over high heat for 3 hours. Serve with mashed potatoes, if you serve it at all. http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/haggis-recipe/index.html?oc=linkback

It may Not taste too bad with enough Ketsup ?

Ah. And robokoi.

Beautiful story! A tear came across my eye just reading it. We have come such a long way. I was 28 when I came out. I didn't have the nerve to do it earlier and being from Alabama, I was terrified. I love going back home to visit now and seeing rainbow necklaces on the guy at Best Buy. Just as a side note, I store the Armistad Maupin books from my library to read them and then returned them. But, they were beautiful.

Have always loved his art. Bizarre Balthus show reveals artist's fixation with cats and young girlsMore character study than retrospective, the Met's provocative new Balthus exhibition has an unsettling undertone • Click here for more images from the Balthus show Jason Farago theguardian.com, Monday 21 October 2013 09.29 EDT Thérèse Dreaming by Balthus, 1938. Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 © Balthus If current trends continue, in just a few years all of contemporary culture will be nothing but an unending stream of cat pictures. Newspapers desperate to survive will publish only adorable kitten photos; social networks will strain under the weight of shorthairs and Siamese. The art world is already getting in on the act: witness the Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis hosting an internet cat video festival (it drew 10,000 viewers in one day), or White Columns, the avant-garde New York gallery, laying on The Cat Show, featuring "purr-formers in residence". The Brooklyn Museum recently rehung its august Egyptian collection in a display called "Divine Felines." Balthus Cats and Girls – Paintings and Provocations Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Until 12 January 2014 Venue details I wonder whether the Metropolitan Museum of Art had our contemporary cat mania in mind when it scheduled its smart, strange exhibition of the Polish-French painter Balthus – a figurative master in an age of abstraction, and one of the creepiest figures of modern art. You may know him as an anti-modernist with a taste for young girls. His love of cats, however, receives less attention, and in this cat-saturated moment that love might become the dominant one. The first painting, on loan from Switzerland, is a remarkable, full-length self-portrait done at the age of 27. Balthus is wearing high-waisted yellow trousers and an abbreviated necktie, stepping forward seductively with his left foot while an obese tabby nuzzles his right. On the floor, a stone tablet bears an inscription in English: "A portrait of HM the King of Cats." He earned the title. In one almost psychedelic work, from 1949, a grinning feline of human proportions sits at a seaside cafe table; a school of fish jumps from the sea on to the cat's plate, trailing behind it a glorious rainbow. In another artist's hands this might feel tasteless. From Balthus, this is par for the course. Cat's whiskers … Detail from Balthus's 1935 self-portrait, The King of Cats (1935). Photograph: Fondation Balthus, Switzerland © Balthus Balthus, born Balthasar Klossowski on 29 February 1908, fell for both art and cats at an early age. At 11, devastated by the disappearance of a stray he'd taken in, the young artist produced 40 memorial ink drawings, each five inches square and done in a forceful black-and-white that recalls the woodcuts of German expressionists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. In the first drawing, the preteen Balthus, wearing shorts, finds the cat, Mitsou, on a park bench. Soon they're snuggling together in bed, walking through the streets (Mitsou prances on a leash), sitting by the Christmas tree. In the final scene Mitsou is gone and the boy is left alone in his bedroom, sobbing uncontrollably. Drawing the line … the final ink drawing in Balthus's Mitsou series (1919, black ink on paper, 6 x 4 3/4 in). Photograph: Private collection © Balthus The Mitsou drawings made it into print in 1921 with a preface by Rainer Maria Rilke, a friend of the Klossowski family and, by the way, one of the lovers of Balthus's mother. Confident, musical, sweet and grim by turns, these drawings – the originals are being shown publicly for the first time, and they're the best reason to see the show – are much more than Balthus juvenilia. They're the pistol shot that began one of the most mystifying, frustrating careers in 20th-century art. He stood at the core of mid-century European culture, a mate of Picasso and Lacan, but despised much of what we now think of as the greatest achievements of modernism. (His brother Pierre Klossowski, subject of a fantastic show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2006, was the more progressive figure.) He was a vile anti-semite, despite his own possible Jewish ancestry. Born into something like genteel poverty, he later styled himself as a count and told Alberto Giacometti that he "needed a château more than a workman needed a loaf of bread". Recipe for concern … The Cat of La Méditerranée by Balthus (1949). Photograph: Private collection © Balthus And, oh, he also had an inordinate fixation on girls who'd just hit puberty. "Little girls are the only creatures today who can be little Poussins," Balthus said late in life, and this show counterposes images of sly, knowing cats with ones of ostensibly innocent children. The Met, not imprudently, has put a plaque at the start of the show that reads: "Some of the paintings in this exhibition may be disturbing to some visitors." Only some visitors? They should disturb us all. Thérèse Blanchard, his first muse (if you can use that word for a child), is shown reclining on a divan with her skirt hiked up, panties clinging to her inner thighs, while a cat sups milk from a saucer. Thérèse is depicted a second time, in bobby socks, splayed out on a bench and losing her balance. One girl is reading a book on the floor, her bottom hiked in the air; another lounges like an odalisque, gazing into a mirror while her bare leg dangles off a settee. The girls are self-possessed and serious, and Balthus always denied any hint of paedophilia. But get real: these are erotic images of children. Some, especially the Thérèse portraits, show real invention and even a little humour that make them difficult to dismiss outright. Others, especially the mannered domestic scenes of his later career, are barely competent acts of voyeurism. Their inclusion here displays a welcome willingness on the part of the curator, Balthus specialist Sabine Rewald, to present the artist in full. More a character study than a real retrospective, this show leaves out many of Balthus's most famous paintings to concentrate on two obsessions that end up rolling into one. Cats may seem anodyne fun to the legions of reblogging obsessives driving today's digital feline explosion. In Balthus's world, though, cats have a much more chilling flipside, and they stay with you long after the latest meme has faded. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/oct/21/balthus-cats-girls-paintings-provocations-metropolitan-review

Princess Hi??? We're not sure We're amused.

I was going to say Wanda Sykes.

Pretty boys are entitled to a bit of leeway.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/620053/clean-neighbourhoods-nomads-protest-district-governments-clean-up-raid/ One would think that someone whose ancestors habitually ate haggis would be a bit less finicky about his food.

Count the cheesy cliches in this video: 1. Singing dramatically in the pouring rain. 2. Impossibly beautiful couple breaking up. 3. Repetitive lyrics ... repetitive lyrics ... repetitive lyrics 4. Pretty boys galore. I LOVE it! lol

I too miss the days when we had a Republican Party that stood for more than a single issue. I think a healthy democracy depends on having at least two good choices when we go to the polls, one that is a little better for some folks, and one that is a little better for other folks. But the Republicans have so polarized the choice around the single poorly defined issue of "big government" that anyone who has more than a single functioning brain cell feels left out. Is there anyone who can even say what "big government" means? Does it mean the percentage of GDP that the government spends? We're nowhere near the top. Does it mean the percentage of GDP that we pay in taxes? We're nowhere near the top. Does it mean the percentage of GDP that we spend on safety nets for our citizens? Again, we're nowhere near the top. Does it mean the percentage of GDP that we spend on wars? Well, there we are near the top. But do you hear the Republicans campaigning for big reductions in the "defense" budget? Or higher taxes to pay for our wars? Not a chance. In fact, it was our last Republican administration that took us into two wars in the Middle East while actually lowering taxes. Was there so much as a peep from Republicans about the national debt then? The only time "big government" becomes an issue these days is when there's a discussion about spending some of our tax money on taking care of the poor, the elderly, and the sick. Even though Social Security is a self-funded program which has always run a surplus, and has been used as a piggy bank for war and to keep other taxes low, the Republicans are hell-bent on raising the retirement age and cutting cost-of-living increases. Republicans are increasingly identifying themselves as a party that doesn't give a shit about most of the average folks in the United States. They'd rather let someone lose their home than get health insurance. They'd prefer another billionaire to someone who is finally able to send a child to college. I apologize for lumping all Republicans under a single banner. There are plenty of Republicans who do not want to see their party highjacked by a fringe group that is probably the most blatantly selfish group of individuals since before the French aristocracy learned how to ride a tumbrel. I'd have more respect for the Tea Party if they would actually stand up in the light of day and admit they want a nation of haves and have-nots. Or if they would agree to a tax that would pay down the trillion dollar debt for even one of our Middle East wars. Or if they would stop hollering for an "alternative" to Obamacare and actually present one. But they are too self-serving to do it. They'd rather see the poor folks in this country get poorer, all the while telling them that they are merely providing them with a 'path' to become as rich as they are. As if there's a chance in hell. While I won't lump all Republicans under this banner, as I am sure many are not, I do hold them liable for not taking the actions necessary to get rid of this selfish bunch of malcontents while they still have a chance. I understand that it will take some courage to do it, and they may take a step backward by doing so. But they're on course to lose the viability of the Party for a long time to come if they don't. And I'll hold the Democrats and Independents liable too. I think the sooner they start educating the voting public that a feel-good campaign against "big government" is little more than a campaign to dismantle the safety net that keeps many of us out of the soup kitchens, the better. /rant