Facebook Adds New Relationship Status For Homosexuals

Social networking platform Facebook has added new options to its 'relationship status' drop down box that allow the LGBT community to indicate the form of relationship they are in.
The changes, which are effective immediately, will only appear in countries where same-sex marriages are yet to be legalised and other official terms are used, like the United States and the UK.

LGBT Facebook users will be able to declare their relationship status by selecting options 'In a domestic partnership' and 'In a civil union'. In the US, the options vary from state to state while in the UK, LGBT members can select 'In a civil partnership'.

 

The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), an organisation that battles the obstacles faced by gays and lesbians online, worked closely with Facebook to bring about the changes.

GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios said in a statement “By acknowledging the relationships of countless loving and committed same-sex couples in the U.S. and abroad, Facebook has set a new standard of inclusion for social media.”
Others from the LGBT community are not so positive about the move by the internet giant, saying that it gives validity to terms such as 'civil partnership' and thereby further cementing the idea that 'marriage' is only for heterosexual couples.

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Straight actors steal lesbian sex scenes as Hollywood embraces gay romance

With Black Swan and The Kids Are All Right vying for Oscars, it seems Hollywood is growing up ... but the best roles still go to straight women

 
The two favourites for the 83rd Oscar for best actress are Natalie Portman and Annette Bening and, if either of them wins, the ceremony will also mark a momentous night for many more women: it will be the night when lesbian sex scenes became part of the cultural mainstream.
Bening's role as the strong matriarchal figure in a gay family in The Kids Are All Right  naturally involves showing the daily intimacies of life with her on-screen partner, played by Julianne Moore. In contrast, Portman's brittle portrayal of the prima ballerina at the centre of Black Swan, a part that has already earned her both a Golden Globe and a Bafta, draws her into a lesbian encounter with a rival ballet dancer that is far from domestic. In both these very different films the gay content is presented as merely incidental to the plot. In fact, of course, it is key to what makes both screenplays feel like fresh, modern stories.
In director Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan, the sexualised rivalry between female leading characters is no longer used as a background note, as it has been in popular thrillers since the heyday of film noir, right up to Nicolas Roeg's Black Widow in 1987 or Barbet Schroeder's Single White Female in 1992. Instead, it takes centre stage. Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right can claim to be groundbreaking, too. It is the first mainstream hit to herald an age when legalised marriage between women might be accepted across the US.
As Colin Firth demonstrated last year with his Oscar nomination for A Single Man, playing a gay character can be a rewarding challenge for a straight leading actor – and one that often brings critical plaudits.
But this year the lesbian sex scenes on screen have become more explicit and more frequent, particularly when compared to the scarcity of Hollywood sex scenes between gay men.
At the Sundance film festival in Utah this year, several new films also put lesbianism in the spotlight. Industry excitement concentrated especially on Pariah, a coming-of-age film from director Dee Rees that told the story of Alike, a gay African-American teenager in New York. The premiere met with a standing ovation and Focus Features has snapped up the worldwide rights to distribute the film ahead of interest from the Weinstein Company and Sony Pictures Classics. Another hit at the festival was a camp, comic treatment of lesbian love. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same tells the story of a reticent, greetings card shop worker whounwittingly falls in love with a lesbian alien called Zoinx.
Before the mid-1930s the restraints of the Hays Production Code in Hollywood meant that depictions of homosexuality were specifically forbidden. Even in the more liberated decades that followed, the physical passion of one woman for another was only ever hinted at on screen, as in the 1961 film version of Lillian Hellman's play The Children's Hour, or else confined within the walls of arthouse cinemas, as with modern gay classics such as 1985's Desert Hearts.
Axel Madsen's 231-page study of Hollywood's secret lesbian group, The Sewing Circle, caused uproar when it was published in 1996. It focused on close friendships between Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland and Joan Crawford, and claimed that Myrna Loy, Tallulah Bankhead, Elsa Lanchester, Barbara Stanwyck and Fred Astaire's sister Adele were all involved in a thriving lesbian scene. Madsen's clear implication was that a network of covert homosexual activity still dominated Hollywood. Now many actresses, such as Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi, are openly gay.
The casting of Portman, Moore and Bening, all straight actresses, in the roles of women who are bisexual or lesbian has provoked acrimony in Hollywood's gay community. Some argued that only well-known heterosexual stars were happy to take gay parts because they could be confident their career would not suffer. This view was drily echoed by gay British novelist Stella Duffy this weekend. "It seems it is always fine for straight women to play lesbians – in fact, they quite often get Oscars for it," she said.
Casting gay women in straight female roles is more of a problem. Several well-known Hollywood leading ladies are thought to be lesbian, but have decided to keep it quiet. Just as gay actor Rupert Everett recently admitted to the Observer that he "would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out", so female starlets who want a shot at the A-list must still lead a double life.
Last month lesbian actress Jane Lynch, who plays bitchy cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester in Glee, showed some sympathy for the problems facing casting directors. "This is a business of projection and desiring people from afar," she said. "And watching people go through trials and tribulations, so there has got to be some truth to it, in terms of, 'I could see myself with that person'. Because the leading man and lady are the people we want them to fall in love with, and most of the audience is straight. So, for right now, we can only use straight actors."
While the era in which Rock Hudson was forced to marry his agent's secretary to keep up appearances is behind us, Neil Giuliano, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (Glaad), points out that it is still legal to be fired from a job in 30 of the American states for being gay and there is no federal hate-crime legislation. Coming out can still be dangerous for anyone, let alone a public figure. Duffy recalls talking to a rising British stage star who told her she had been advised to stay "in the closet".
"I was shocked to speak to a young actress who had been told by an older gay actress that she should definitely not come out if she wanted to get a range of roles. And this was an actress who had just done a film and a three-month stint in a regional theatre!" said Duffy. "I was really surprised because I knew she was gay and she was successful and she did not know whether to be out or not."
Duffy suspects the difficulty lies in the fact that there are still few high-profile lesbians in the entertainment industry. "It has been easier for women to stay invisible; not right, but easier. We didn't ever have the law against us. Men have had to come out and fight."
Several leading Hollywood actresses have come out in recent years, from Amber Heard, star of Pineapple Express, to Lindsay Lohan and Sex and the City's Cynthia Nixon, but their decision still often coincides with a tacit acceptance they may no longer be leading-lady material. Meredith Baxter, the star of the sitcom Family Ties, announced she was gay live on television, while Kelly McGillis, the leading lady in Witness and Top Gun, came out on SheWired.com, one of the largest lesbian-oriented websites in America. "I am done with the man thing," McGillis said. "I did that and need to move on in life."
The actress, who had married twice, said that coming out was a hard process that had started when she was a girl. "It was a long, arduous journey for me," McGillis said. "I had a lot of things happen that convinced me that God was punishing me because I was gay, so that was a hard process for me."
Historically, lesbian characters in film are often portrayed as threatening. Just as homosexual or effeminate men are viewed with suspicion in many screenplays, so gay women are associated with predatory obsession.
From the Beryl Reid character in The Killing of Sister George, to the malevolent and deluded teacher who is played by Judi Dench in Richard Eyre's film of Notes on a Scandal, cinema's crop-haired lesbians are clearly to be avoided. Beautiful young ballet dancers, however, can at least expect to be granted a sex scene.
This sort of unbalanced representation of gay women in mainstream show business is inevitable, Stella Duffy is convinced, as long as Hollywood is controlled by male bosses.
"The reason we see a lot of gay female sex on screen now is because straight men tend to get off on seeing gay women on screen and they don't get off on seeing gay men. And men are in charge. It is as simple as that," she said.

Is "Born this Way" our New Anthem?

After much anticipation, Lady Gaga debuted her new song "Born this Way" 

She performed it last night at the Grammys. Some say it sounds just like Madonna. (That way my first impression when I heard the song.) But the more I listen, the more it grows on me. I like it. When have you ever heard a pop song with the words lesbian and transgendered in them?

No matter gay, straight or bi

Lesbian, transgendered life                           
I'm on the right track, baby
I was born to survive
No matter black, white or beige
Chola or orient made
I'm on the right track, baby
I was born to be brave

What do you think? Do you like it? Is "Born this Way" the new LGBT anthem? 

Gay roles on television need to be real

 When it comes to the portrayal of gay and lesbian people on TV, it's still the same old issues and cliches

 Last week saw the publication of the Corporation's "Portrayal of Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual People on the BBC", a document only marginally more anticipated than the local phone directory. It runs at a mammoth 226 pages and, having read all of it, I can say with certainty that this is one dossier no one could be accused of "sexing up".
Let me begin by saying that whatever conclusions I draw, they will be incorrect. I will have said the wrong thing, sold out, screwed over the sisterhood or dissed my brothers. I'm simply not capable of representing the diverse and dizzyingly rich panorama of gay existence, and neither, it transpires, is television.

Although the BBC and Channel 4 fare well in this report, there is much left to do. The responsibility must fall on the biggest hitters – soap operas. Watched by millions of middle Englanders week after week, they could change the perception of gay people where it matters most. In 1987, EastEnders' Barry and Colin shared a chaste mouth-graze. In 1994, Brookside's Beth and Margaret locked lips. Coronation Street discovered lesbians this year. If gay history had evolved as slowly and timidly as television portrayed it, then the first drag queen would be tiptoeing out of the primordial ooze around about now.
What saddens me is that the same issues keep arising. For gay men, it's the predominance of the camp cliche. For lesbians, despair at the outdated butch-femme stereotypes. Gay women generally are under-represented, unless you count the number of times the word "lesbian" or "dyke" features as a lazy comic's punchline.

As compensation we have gay-centric dramas; the excellent Sugar Rush and the groundbreaking Queer as Folk. Maybe the up-and-coming Lip Service on BBC3 will join those ranks. But surely, in order for true ground to break, there has to be a middle way – something between the tepid sexlessness of the soaps' queer couplings and the separatist universe of the US show The L Word, in which the characters are like something out of the Barbie Lesbian Range: the tennis pro with detachable miniskirt, the hairdresser with blow-drier.
For me the solution is less "L" word than "I" word. Issues. Gay characters are a gift because they can deliver the shock value that soap operas are hardwired to. But surely, by normalising rather than pathologising gay culture you please not only gay respondents, but the 19% of heterosexual viewers that the report reveals are still squeamish about our presence on their screens.
When gay characters stop cat-hoarding, scatter-cushion throwing and compulsively shagging — when we're just sitting around paying bills like Average Jos – then middle England, and the Queer Nation, will be happy
True Lesbiღns

FBI investigating lesbians' house fire as hate crime

The FBI confirms it is now investigating the Labor Day weekend house fire of a lesbian couple in Tennessee as a possible hate crime.

Laura Stutte says "it has shaken me to the core."

Carol Ann Stutte says "this is our first time from the safe house and she did great."

Laura and Carol Ann Stutte say years of threats from a particular neighbor had escalated. They installed a gate, security lights, and barbed fencing around their home near Vonore in Monroe County.

Carol Ann says "the final threats near the end were we were going to be killed and our house burned down. And we were told what's better than one dead queer is two dead queers to our face. That's when we finally started filing police reports."

They came home from a Labor Day weekend trip to find a slur painted on their garage next to where their house used to stand.

Laura says "everything we worked for for the last 5 years just burned down to the ground."

Carol Ann says "I was just sitting out on the land, no home, and these wonderful people like angels came and got us and said you're coming with us. You will be safe and that's where we've been staying."

They don't plan to rebuild here. But do want to stay in east Tennessee.

Carol Ann says "so many many people have come out and are sending their love and prayers."

As for the person who did this, Carol Ann says "I want to see them get help. I do not want them to be able to do this to anyone else."

True Lesbiღns

Corrie Lesbians Steal The Show!!

CORRIE lesbians Sacha Parkinson and Brooke Vincent upped the glamour stakes at a bash last night - but their co-star Jennie McAlpine couldn't quite keep up.

 The actresses attended the Manchester Pride Gala Dinner along with Vicky Binns, who plays Weatherfield's Molly Dobbs.

Sacha and Brooke, who play on-screen lovers Sian Powers and Sophie Webster, stole the show as they flaunted their trim figures in short frocks.


But Jennie decided not to don a trendy dress like her fellow stars - and opted for a shiny pink jumpsuit instead, teamed up with a white belt.

Her character Fiz Stape isn't exactly known for having a great dress sense.

But it looks like Jennie should take more inspiration from her co-stars in real life.

Local bakery refuses to make rainbow cupcakes for gay customer

An Indianapolis bakery is under fire from the gay and lesbian community over a choice not to serve a diversity group.

 

First national survey finds 1.5 per cent of adults say they are gay, lesbian or bisexual

A survey of 450,000 UK adults has found that 1.5 per cent were willing to identify themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual. The Integrated Household Survey, carried out by the Office for National Statistics, is the second largest after the census.
This is the first time the survey has asked about sexual identity and the ONS stressed that the question was "experimental".
Nearly four per cent of those asked refused to answer, said they did not know or described themselves as "other".
Of the five per cent who did not say they were heterosexual, one per cent said they were gay or lesbian, 0.5 per cent said they were bisexual and 3.5 per cent refused to answer the question, described themselves as "other" or said they did not know.
Gay rights charity Stonewall and the government both use a figure of six per cent of the population being lesbian, gay or bisexual, which works out at 3.6 million people.
This figure comes from 2005 research by the Department for Trade and Industry.
Other studies on sexual orientation have found that the figure varies between six and ten per cent.
In this study, the ONS used the phrase 'sexual identity' rather than 'sexual orientation'. No responses were collected by proxy (allowing, for example, another member of a household to answer).
Stonewall welcomed today's figures but said they must be treated with "caution".
Ruth Hunt, deputy director of public affairs at Stonewall, said the charity was pleased the research had been carried out but said it was a "shame it took so long".
She told PinkNews.co.uk: "Six per cent is the Treasury actuary figure. Based on this, the figure is still about right.
"We have to view these results with caution. It's the first time people have been asked and we expect the figures to rise in a few years."
Ms Hunt added that such data should be collected as a matter of course, including in the census, and said Stonewall had urged GPs' surgeries to ask patients about their sexual orientation.
On the danger of the 1.5 per cent figure being used to argue against gay equality, she said: "We know other equality strands such as faith have this problem [of surveys not being representative]. Even the figures for faith do not reflect the lived experience of those on the ground."
The largest numbers of gay, lesbian and bisexual people were found in London, while the lowest numbers were in Northern Ireland.
Men were twice as likely as women to describe themselves as gay/lesbian.
The research also asked about religion, with 71 per cent of people describing themselves as Christian and 21 per cent saying they had no religion.
The research carried out between April 2009 and March 2010 and comprises the results of six ONS surveys.
Participants were telephoned or presented with cards asking which of the following options best described how they see themselves: heterosexual/straight, gay/lesbian, bisexual or other.
Ninety-five per cent said they were heterosexual, one per cent said they were gay or lesbian and 0.5 per cent said they were bisexual.
Just under three per cent stated "don’t know" or refused the question, one per cent did not provide a response and 0.5 per cent defined themselves as "other".

Florida ends ban on gays and lesbians adopting

The US state of Florida has overturned its ban on gays and lesbians adopting children.

Governor Charlie Crist announced the 3rd District Court of Appeal ruling yesterday and said the ban would end immediately, although the decision can be appealed.

The 1977 law made Florida the only US state to ban gay adoption, despite permitting gays and lesbians to foster children.

 Yesterday, the court upheld a 2008 ruling by a Miami-Dade judge who approved the adoption of two young brothers by Martin Gill and his male partner.

The boys were neglected by their biological parents and were placed with Mr Gill and his partner in 2004.

Writing on behalf of the three judges on the appeal court panel, Judge Gerald Cope pointed out the disparity of allowing gays and lesbians to foster but not adopt children.

"It is difficult to see any rational basis in utilising homosexual persons as foster parents or guardians on a temporary or permanent basis, while imposing a blanket prohibition on those same persons," he wrote.

"All other persons are eligible to be considered case-by-case to be adoptive parents."

Gay rights campaigners in Florida have warned that gay adoption opponents may seek to place a measure in the state constitution barring gay people from adopting.

Speaking after the ruling, Mr Gill said: “This is just the news that we have been waiting so anxiously for here.

“This is a giant step toward being able to give our sons the stability and permanency that they are being denied.”

Leslie Cooper, a senior staff attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union, which supported Mr Gill, said: “Florida’s law unconstitutionally singles out gay people and the children in their care for unequal treatment, denying many children the long-term security that comes with adoption.

"We are grateful that the court saw the cruel consequences this law has on children, especially those in foster care who may never know the security of a permanent home.”