Hallmark, magic and gay-on-gay protests

Hallmark tries out gay ads

Saccharine love notes aren’t only for straights anymore. While the greeting card company has been making gay-marriage cards since 2008, Hallmark is really diving into the gay pool with a new ad campaign featuring a lesbian couple. “You know gay ads have gone mainstream when even Hallmark is making them,” writes Adweek.

São Paulo to pay trans youth to go to school

Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, will offer money to trans youth if they are enrolled in high school. A city spokesman says the program aims to prevent trans people from having to turn to prostitution to support themselves and to give them “the chance to improve their lives and leave their current situation of economic and social vulnerability.”

Read more from the Associated Press.

Columbia launches public-policy website featuring gay families

Columbia Law School has launched a website, What We Know, that aims to consolidate scholarly research on public-policy questions and give people easy access to facts. Their first project: LGBT families. To explore whether children with gay and lesbian parents are disadvantaged, the authors collected 73 studies, 70 of which said that the children of gay families had no added problems.

Gay protests gay in New York

In a display of the growing cracks in the American gay-rights movement, protesters, including members of the AIDS activist group ACT UP, say they will demonstrate outside a New York gala fundraiser for the Human Rights Campaign. In a press release, ACT UP accuses the HRC of ignoring HIV and focusing on marriage equality at the expense of other issues.

Does the “gay community” have a future?

At The Atlantic, Evan Beck looks into the future of being gay after marriage equality and asks if the idea of a “gay community” will still have meaning. Are there any bonds that draw all gay people together, or will, as Andrew Sullivan predicted, the community “expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that ‘gayness’ alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual?”

Magic: The Gathering introduces trans character

The world of one of the nerdiest of all nerdy collector card games, Magic: The Gathering, has a new trans character. The game’s creator has unveiled a short story and accompanying card about an armour-wearing, army-leading, dragon-slaying trans woman named Alesha.