No Gay Sex, Please-We’re from Virginia

ABCNews:
Virginians’ Guidebooks to Minneapolis Returned to Publisher Due to Gay Nightlife Section

A campaign official for the Virginia Lieutenant Governor cancelled an order for 150 guidebooks to entertainment in Minneapolis-St. Paul after discovering they included a 6-8 page section for gay and lesbian nightclubs.

A campaign official for the Virginia Lieutenant Governor canceled an order for 150 guidebooks to entertainment in Minneapolis-St. Paul after discovering they included a 6-8 page section for gay and lesbian nightclubs.

(ABC)

“Having a section dedicated solely to GLBT will be a BIG problem for many of our folks. We simply can’t hand them out,” wrote the aide, Melissa Busse, in an email to the guidebook publisher, Rake Publishing, obtained by ABC affiliate KSTP.

Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling said he was not aware of the decision by his aide and disagrees with it.

The books, intended as welcome gifts to members of the Virginia delegation, were called “Secrets of the City.”

Rake’s website features information and listings for an array of nightlife activities for gays and lesbians in the Minneapolis area, including “queer speed dating”, trivia night, and dildo bingo.

Because they didn’t mention it at the Republican convention…

AP: ‘Broken man’ Abramoff gets 4 years in prison

Broken and disgraced, lobbyist Jack Abramoff will spend four years in prison for his role in a corruption scandal that upended Washington politics and contributed to the Republicans’ loss of Congress in 2006.

The once powerful Washington insider, at times choking back tears during his sentencing hearing Thursday, appeared crestfallen as a judge handed down a longer sentence than prosecutors had sought.

Over the past three years, Abramoff has come to symbolize corruption and the secret deals cut between lobbyists and politicians in back rooms or on golf courses or private jets. The scandal shook Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to Capitol Hill.

“I come before you as a broken man,” Abramoff said at his sentencing before U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle. “I’m not the same man who happily and arrogantly engaged in a lifestyle of political and business corruption.”

He added later that, “My name is the butt of a joke, the source of a laugh and the title of a scandal.”

Already two years into a prison term from a separate case in Florida, Abramoff, 49, will have spent about six years in prison by the time he is released, far longer than he and his attorneys expected for a man who became the key FBI witness in his own corruption case.

With Abramoff’s help, the Justice Department has won corruption convictions against former Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, former Deputy Interior Secretary J. Steven Griles and several top Capitol Hill aides. Defense lawyers predicted more convictions would follow.

Was a Would-Be Saint Gay?

Time Magazine The long-running battle between gay rights activists and the Vatican has moved into the realm of the dead. With 19th century Anglican convert Cardinal John Henry Newman, arguably the greatest Catholic thinker from the English-speaking world, moving ever closer to sainthood, trouble is brewing over where his final resting place should be. The London-born historian and theologian died in 1890 and, following the instructions in his will, was buried beside his lifelong friend and fellow convert Ambrose St. John, who had died 15 years earlier. Newman’s deep expressions of grief after St. John’s death, along with other writings, have led some historians to ask whether the two men, who lived together for many years, lived much like common-law spouses.

Newman, whose ideas on conscience and faith have influenced Christian theology ever since, is expected to be beatified next year following the Vatican’s recent certification of a Newman miracle — when a Boston man’s cure from a crippling spinal disease could not be explained medically. The final step of canonization — full Sainthood — will require proof of an additional miracle achieved through the intercession of Newman’s spirit. The Vatican announced plans this month to move Newman’s remains from a small gravesite in the central English town of Rednal to a specially built sarcophagus in the Oratory Church of Birmingham, where, officials say, they will be more accessible for venerating faithful.

But British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell sees ulterior motives in exhuming the Cardinal: “embarrassment” because of his relationship with St. John. “They were inseparable, they lived together for half a century, effectively like husband and wife,” says Tatchell. “There were repeated allegations during [Newman's] lifetime about his circle of homosexual friends. It is uncertain whether their relationship involved sex. It is quite likely that both men had a gay orientation but chose to abstain from sexual relations. But abstinence does not alter a person’s sexual orientation.” Tatchell says that the two men’s bond, and Newman’s abiding wish to have his final resting place next to St. John’s, make separating their remains “an act of dishonesty and betrayal by the homophobes in the Vatican.”(continue reading)

Snowboarder Ryan Miller: Out on the Slopes

Outsports

Snowboarder Ryan Miller suffers for his sport.

Two years ago he screwed up his ankle during one run. Last year he crashed into a gate and messed up his left knee. And his most recent injury cost him any chance at landing a spot on the U.S. Winter Olympic team.

“I could barely stand up,” said Miller, 26, from his training center in Steamboat Springs, Colo. That’s what a chipped vertebrae that initially knocks your spine off up to 3 inches will do. Miller, a gay professional Alpine snowboarder, sent his back into spasms during a training run a week before Olympic qualifying races Jan. 4-6.

The crash sent him flying through the air and knocked him unconscious. Amazingly, his injuries did not prevent him from competing at the snowboarding trials at Mt. Bachelor, Ore. They did, however, keep him from performing anywhere near his peak, and Miller finished a combined 21st for his two runs. Only the top three qualified for Salt Lake City.

With his Olympics chances gone, Miller is now setting his sights on making the U.S. national team this year or next, with the hopes of being an Olympian in 2006.

“Injuries like this are common,” Miller said. “You’re going 40 to 50 miles per hour, basically on one ski … the slightest miscalculation” can cause a crash.
Tired of Acting

Despite his travails on the slopes, Miller is a man at peace. It’s what coming out has meant to him. Miller is the only openly elite gay snowboarder in the U.S. (“and I don’t know of any who are even closeted,” he says), having come out during the 2000-2001 season. He has known he was gay since his sophomore year in college.

During the winter of 2000-2001, Miller was part of a mixed-gender professional snowboarding team. Which meant he was eating, sleeping, training, competing and socializing with the same group of people full-time for months.

“I just got tired of putting on a straight-acting role,” says Miller, a native of Pennsylvania. “I would listen to [teammates'] stories and it was uncomfortable for me to make up the lies.” Looking back, Miller has no regrets about coming out. “It took a lot of stress off me and has made me happier.”

Miller made his declaration on a team trip to Vancouver, British Columbia, when a group of teammates invited him to join them on a trip to a local strip club. He declined, simply stating, “I’m not into that … I’m gay.” He received a shoulder colder than a Canadian winter from his teammates save for two women and one man. Invitations to social events dried up, the camaraderie ended and he was basically shunned.

The reaction from fellow athletes seems to go against the public perception of snowboarders as free-spirited, anything-goes types. But not all snowboarders are created equal. The extreme, radical crowd is into freestyle snowboarding, halfpipe in Olympic terminology. They are judged in their event akin to figure skaters.

Miller’s discipline, in contrast, is Alpine snowboarding, which uses a longer and more narrow board and whose events “don’t give as much room for self-expression.” In Alpine, the clock rules: whoever makes it down the hill the fastest (while navigating a series of slalom gates) wins.

“Freestylers are more likely to be more accepting of gays,” Miller says. The Alpine side is more conservative, the equipment more expensive, with much fewer places to train.

Despite his sport’s more conservative nature, Miller is very out and proud. His board boasts stickers from his sponsors: Outboard.org (a gay and lesbian snowboarding group); Team Philadelphia (whose pink triangle is hard to miss) and Team Flame (an organization for gay elite athletes).

At one Swedish library, you can borrow books—and a lesbian

The Advocate: A Swedish library, realizing that books are not the only things being judged by their covers, will give visitors a different opportunity this weekend—to borrow a Muslim, a lesbian, or a Dane.

The city library in Malmo, Sweden’s third-largest city, will let curious visitors check out living people for a 45-minute chat in a project meant to tear down prejudices about different religions, nationalities, or professions. The project, called Living Library, was introduced at Denmark’s Roskilde Festival in 2000, librarian Catharina Noren said. It has since been tried at a Copenhagen library as well as in Norway, Portugal, and Hungary.

The people available to be “borrowed” also include a journalist, a gypsy, a blind man, and an animal rights activist. They will be available Saturday and Sunday in conjunction with a Malmo city festival and are meant to give people “a new perspective on life,” the library said in a statement. “There are prejudices about everything,” Noren said. “This is about fighting those prejudices and promoting coexistence.”

Borrowing a person will be free, and the library will also provide coffee at its cafe where the “living books” will answer questions about their lives, beliefs, or jobs. “It’s supposed to be relaxed and human-to-human,” Noren said. (full article)