My Gay Online

According to EqualityMatters.org, the fast food company donated nearly $2 million in 2009 to groups that have anti-gay agendas.
IRS 990 forms show that WinShape, the restaurant chain’s charitable foundation which was founded by Chick-Fil-A’s chairman S. Truett Cathy in 1994, gave to the following groups in 2009:
• Marriage & Family Legacy Fund: $994,199
• Fellowship Of Christian Athletes: $480,000
• National Christian Foundation: $240,000
• Focus On The Family: $12,500
• Eagle Forum: $5,000
• Exodus International: $1,000
• Family Research Council: $1,000
An earlier investigation by Equality Matters found that Chick-Fil-A, which was recently voted the third most beloved restaurant chain in the United States, donated more than $1 million to anti-gay groups between 2003 and 2008. The IRS forms from 2009 are the most recent available as public records.
In January Chick-Fil-A president Dan Cathy defended the chain saying, “We’re not anti-anybody… Our mission is to create raving fans.”
Cathy was also forced to respond to gay activists’ claims after the company provided lunch at a marriage-training event sponsored by Pennsylvania Family Institute.
Cathy asserted, “While my family and I believe in the Biblical definition of marriage, we love and respect anyone who disagrees.”
In recent months students attending at least six universities, including University of North Texas, Mississippi State University, and the University of New Orleans, have launched petitions asking their schools not to support anti-LGBT businesses like Chick-Fil-A.
LGBT activists have also staged protests at a number of the chain’s locations throughout the country, including Chicago and Hollywood.

A gay kiss in the musical “Zanna Don’t” staged at a Connecticut high school triggered a walkout last week.
The musical was playing last Friday night at Hartford Public High School when the incident took place reports CBS Connecticut. Students from the high school’s law, government, and nursing academies were in attendance.
The plot of “Zanna Don’t!” involves a high school where homosexuality is the norm and heterosexuals are the outcasts.
After two male actors shared a brief kiss on the lips on stage, a group of students, most of them male and many of them football players, got up and left the auditorium.
“It was visually evident (due to the jerseys the team was wearing) that a lot of football players got up and walked out. It was almost a symbolic kind of thing,” Adam Johnson, principal of the Government and Law Academy at the high school, told CBS Connecticut.
He also noted that many students opted out of attending the play because of the subject matter.
“There are always circumstances [in organizing these programs] under which the values of the student or their family come into play,” Johnson said, adding, “It’s a balancing act of individual values and the expectations of the school … [and] it was interesting, actually, seeing the apprehension.”
Johnson had received calls from concerned parents in the weeks leading up to the musical’s opening but he stood firm and stated that he believed it was important to show gay “intimacy” in the same way that society shows straight intimacy.
“When one teacher asked if I wanted to remove [the kiss], I said absolutely not,” Johnson said.
“Even though it’s kind of chaotic, kind of wild and crazy, I see it as very successful,” David Chambers, principal of the nursing academy, told Courant.com. “Our kids never deal with this, they keep it inside, and that’s that nervous energy. That’s why they walked out.”
Johnson added, “I think that we’re at a time in history where there is tremendous focus on bullying and the way students are treating each other, and how they are treated, in school… We have to teach students how to respect and honor each other. [The students] need to learn about the diversity of the world and respecting the rights of all people. [I’m] really glad that we did this program.”
A task force created by Leadership Greater Hartford’s Quest program and True Colors oversaw the production which, according to participant Louise Provenzano, aimed to bring “the message of inclusiveness and … compassion to the community” in light of “national and local stories about LGBTQ issues and bullying.”
“Through humor … and music, we’re able to address uncomfortable topics and very serious issues for many,” she said

The National Organization For Marriage (NOM) is an anti-gay group that has gone to great lengths in hopes of ensuring that marriage remains between one man and one woman.
Lately its members have turned their attention to New Hampshire, where Republican lawmakers are working to repeal the 15-month old gay marriage law passed by the state’s Legislature.
Though polls show that the citizens of New Hampshire are against the repeal by a 2-1 marginand Governor John Lynch says he’ll veto the bill if it comes to his desk, NOM is toiling away trying to make people believe that the majority of the people in the state support the repeal.
How are they doing this? With the magic of Photoshop.
As the blog Good As You and Rachel Maddow pointed out yesterday, NOM has taken (at least) two photos of rallies held for now-President Obama and repurposed them to make it look like thousands of people are attending their anti-marriage events.
The first photo, featured on the NOM website, was taken from an Obama rally held in St. Louis in 2008. The second photo, Good As You notes, was used to make NOM President Brian Brown’s speech look well attended but is actually from a rally where 60,000 people came out to see Obama in Columbus, Ohio, in 2008.

New York City will soon be home to the nation’s first full-time center for elderly lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender residents, which is scheduled to open in January.
On Wednesday, the Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders (SAGE) was awarded an “Innovative Senior Center” (ISC) contract by the office of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the New York City Department for the Aging (DFTA) for the new project. The SAGE Center will be based in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood but offer a “comprehensive array of services and support” to LGBT elders throughout all five boroughs.
Though financial aspects of the deal were not released, SAGE is just one of eight providers selected as part of the ISC initiative. Others chosen for development include one specifically for adults with vision problems, and another offering a community gardening option. “The needs of seniors have evolved since centers were created 50 years ago and now is the time to re-envision the one-size-fits-all approach that has traditionally shaped many of our centers,” Bloomberg said in a statement.

According to SAGE Senior Director of Programming Catherine Thurston, the new facility will offer its participants a variety of unique programming that, while not necessarily radically different in terms of content, will be designed to cater to the needs and interests of the LGBT community. “For elderly people who are also LGBT, going to traditional senior centers can pose a variety of unique challenges,” Thurston told The Huffington Post. “Many LGBT elderly say they feel they’ve encountered discrimination, anything from simply feeling excluded to something more overt. … If you cannot authentically be who you are at this stage of your life, it’s really tragic.”
Authorities also say the center will service an estimated 300 people a day throughout the city, while its Manhattan-based headquarters will provide an anticipated 130 hot meals each day. Though SAGE currently provides similar programming at New York’s LGBT Community Center in Greenwich Village, the new contract will allow officials to extend the services to those who may not be aware or able to access them otherwise. “Obviously the impact will be much greater than that because it won’t be the same 300 people each day,” Thurston added.
When it opens, the SAGE Center will follow similar facilities in Spain and Germany in catering to the elderly LGBT population. In addition, DFTA Commissioner Lilliam Barrios-Paoli said the center would be a critical step in improving New York’s image as an age-friendly city. “We are very excited that for the first time in this country, LGBT seniors will have a full-service, comprehensive center with access to supports and services to meet their specific need,” she noted in an email.

City Pages has painted an extremely unflattering picture of “Diner’s Drive-Ins and Dives” star Guy Fieri.
The paper relies on damning quotes from former “DDD” producer David Page who, among several grievances, claims Fieri exhibited homophobic behavior.
From City Pages:

Fieri also needed protection from homosexuals, or at least advance warning. Early in the show’s run, Page got a phone call from Fieri, who’d just walked out of a restaurant in a huff.
“Guy had decided that the two men running the restaurant were life partners,” Page remembers. “He said, ‘You can’t send me to talk to gay people without warning! Those people weird me out!’”

A spokesperson for Fieri defended the Food Network celebrity in a statement issued to Eater:
Guy’s reputation speaks for itself. He’s a standup guy who does right by people. He would never make the kind of comments attributed to him in this story, and anyone who knows or has even met him knows that.
After Fieri’s PR team released the statement, City Pages reached out to former “DDD” field producer Kari Kloster, who’s also quoted in the paper’s original piece. Kloster is now a vice president at Page’s production company and she backs up what her boss said about Fieri’s homophobic behavior.

“From my memory of being a field producer it’s just well-known to me among the crew that Guy has a problem — if there was a homosexual in a restaurant, as the main character, the shoot went different,” Kloster said in a statement.
This isn’t the first time Page has lambasted Fieri. In August, Page settled a lawsuit with Food Network alleging that the company refused to give him access to Fieri, effectively making it impossible to produce “DDD.” After the lawsuit was put to bed, Page told the New York Post that Fieri shut him out after the first few seasons of the show, and it was at Fieri’s request that the Food Network fired him.

Wheaton College, a religious Christian school in Chicago’s west suburbs, has for the second time in three years ranked as the least LGBT-friendly college in the nation, according to a new report released by the Princeton Review.
Some 400 gay, lesbian and supportive alumni of the Christian school signed onto an open letter, which OneWheaton organized, addressed to the student body urging them to resist “feeling alienated, ashamed and afraid” despite the campus’s reputation as not being particularly open when it comes to LGBT issues. The letter was issued in response to the school sponsoring a speaker who encouraged those who “experience same-sex attraction” to choose a life of celibacy instead.
The Chicago Tribune reports that, in response to the ranking, the college issued the following statement: “Our goal is to follow God’s truth, including what the Bible says about sexual ethics. … While some may interpret this stance as hostility to the LGBTQ community, our aim is to stand respectfully and graciously for biblical truth.”
Other Midwestern schools listed among the most LGBT-unfriendly in the Princeton Review’s ranking include College of the Ozarks (fifth, in Point Lookout, Mo.), University of Notre Dame (sixth, in Notre Dame, Ind.) and Calvin College (sixteenth, in Grand Rapids, Mich.).
Among the most LGBT-friendly, no Illinois campuses were listed, though the University Of Wisconsin-Madison ranked sixth. Macalester College (St. Paul, Minn.) and Grinnell College (Grinnell, Iowa) were the only other Midwestern campuses to make the top twenty.

The coming out of “Star Trek” hunk Zachary Quinto has already inspired an ABC news anchor to publicly follow suit.
Though Dan Kloeffler’s admission was certainly subtle and nonchalant — “I’m thinking I can lose my distraction about dating actors,” he quipped while commenting on a segment about Quinto — it was the first time the World News Now reporter acknowledged his sexuality while on the air. He has since gone on to call it an act of solidarity.
“…For the same reason that Zach decided to come out, I too, no longer wanted to hide this part of my life,” the 35-year-old Kloeffler wrote. “There have been too many tragic endings and too many cases of bullying because of intolerance…as a journalist, I don’t want to be the story, but as a gay man I don’t want to stand silent if I can offer some inspiration or encouragement to kids that might be struggling with who they are.”

A Florida school board turned town a nearly $55,000 grant from a group affiliated with Boy Scouts for the first time in 11 years. A majority of board members agreed that Boy Scouts discriminates against LGBT people, WTSP reports.
Pinellas County School Board member Linda Lerner has been fighting against accepting the money for 10 years, and yesterday she received enough votes to turn down the grant for the first time.

The “Learning for Life” grant is an outside program aimed at helping students build character and values such as respect and responsibility, FOX Tampa Bay reports.
Lerner points to a portion of the Boy Scouts Oathshe said she believes has discriminatory undertones: “On my honor I will do my best…To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight,” WTSP points out.
“If you’re gay, it says you’re not morally straight and clean,” Lerner said in the board meeting after citing part of the oath, the St. Petersburg Times reports.
The Boy Scouts of America have a history of fighting against homosexuality, but the national organization told WTSP that it “teaches its members to use courtesy and respect at all times. To disagree does not mean to disrespect.”
In a 2000 opinion, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Boy Scouts of America could reject openly LGBTl members because laws against discrimination applied only to places of “public accommodation”, such as restaurants and libraries.

The ruling stated that the private membership organization had a freedom of expressive association, and that a gay leader “would significantly affect its expression,” since the Boy Scouts “asserts that homosexual conduct is inconsistent with the values embodied in the Scout Oath and Law, particularly with the values represented by the terms “morally straight” and “clean.
The grant money would have gone to several area schools, but the district reportedly has plans to expand a character-building program already in place.

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum doubled down on his recent comments opposing allowing gay soldiers to serve in the U.S. military, invoking the image of soldiers showering together to explain his support for reinstating the discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
“The problem is that sexual activity with people who you are in close quarters with who happen to be of the same sex is different than being open about your sexuality,” Santorum said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Fox host Chris Wallace pushed back, asking Santorum if he was suggesting gay soldiers would “go after” their colleagues.
“They’re in close quarters, they live with people, they obviously shower with people,” Santorum said, saying the presence of gay soldiers could have an adverse “effect on retention and recruitment.”
Wallace played a clip of Santorum insisting during a recent Republican primary debate that the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” was an improper injection of “social policy” into the armed forces. Wallace then presented a quote from a former military official to Santorum and asked whether he agreed with its basic idea: “The army is not a sociological laboratory. … Experiments … are a danger to efficiency, discipline and morale and would result in ultimate defeat.”
Santorum, looking uncomfortable, said that he did agree with the general idea of the statement. Wallace then revealed that the quote was from Colonel E.R. Householder, a World War II-era official whose comments were made in opposition to the racial integration of the military.
Santorum responded by attempting to distinguish between racial discrimination and discrimination based on sexual orientation, denouncing the former, while insisting the latter is an acceptable condemnation of inappropriate “behavior.”
“It’s not the same thing,” Santorum said. “You are black by the color of your skin. You are not homosexual, necessarily, by the color of your skin.”

Diddy snapped after this weekends BET Hip Hop Awards, when he threw ice and shouted racial and homophobic slurs at another man, Ricky Parker. Allegedly, Parker was called out for not drinking Diddy’s brand of alcohol, Ciroc, at an event for the booze. Now, the mogul realized that he has “backslid and regressed”.