Conan O’Brien does Grindr
After exploring the world of Tinder, TV host Conan O’Brien has moved on to Grindr. In a new video, he tries his luck at gay hookups, under the alias “Frecklefucker.”
Irish same-sex marriage campaign heats up
As Ireland draws closer to a referendum on same-sex marriage and adoption in May, opponents are upping their rhetoric, sending out leaflets that claim homosexuality causes cancer, shorter lifespans and suicide. One leaflet calls same-sex marriage “the nihilistic, elitist, anti-life agenda of atheists.” Polls show that the majority of Irish people will likely support same-sex marriage.
Gay couple says Scottish hotel refused wedding
A Scottish gay couple says the owner of a luxury hotel on Loch Lomond ushered them out and told them “we can’t allow people like you in here,” refusing to plan the couple’s wedding. The owner now denies ever having the conversation, and calls the accusations “seriously defamatory.”
Court cases threaten same-sex parenting rights
A New Jersey lesbian couple received sperm donations for two children from two men who said they wanted nothing to do with the children. Now the men have changed their minds, and courts are granting them visitation rights to their biological children. In Kansas, the state is demanding a sperm donor pay back public assistance money given to the lesbian mothers he donated sperm to through Craigslist, because as the biological father he can’t escape his responsibilities. At Slate, John Culhane looks at how decisions like these are eroding the rights of sperm-donation recipients to real parenthood over their children.
Irish lesbian couple beaten unconscious
Two young women were attacked on the street in Limerick, Ireland, and one was beaten unconscious, by two men shouting anti-gay slurs. The men have not been identified, but one of the women said they were in their mid-20s and “well-dressed, as if coming back from a night out.”
The great sodomy turnaround
The man largely responsible for keeping sodomy laws on the books in the American South for decades has changed his mind, and now is standing up for gay rights. In 1986, Georgia Attorney General Mike Bowers went to the US Supreme Court to argue for the constitutionality of sodomy laws, and won. Sodomy laws remained legal until 2003. Bowers says he’s “mellowed” with age, however, and is now lobbying against new “licence to discriminate” laws in Georgia.