St Petersburg takes down iPhone statue because of Tim Cook (Russia)
Russia is taking Tim Cook’s being gay pretty hard. After the Apple CEO came out last week in a Businessweek essay, the city of St Petersburg removed a two-metre-high iPhone monument that stood near a college. The group of companies that first erected the iPhone said in a statement, “After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was taken down to abide to the Russian federal law protecting children from information promoting denial of traditional family values.”
Read more at The Sydney Morning Herald.
Gay couples feud over sperm donation custody rights (UK)
Two gay couples in the UK have provided a perfect example of how not to handle sperm donation. A gay male couple donated sperm to two lesbian friends, but when the men applied to have contact with the children, the women refused. The disagreement then devolved into a six-year legal battle. The judge in the case characterized the relationship between the two couples as “mutual loathing” and wrote that “the case illustrates all too clearly the immense difficulties which can be unleashed when families are created by known-donor fertilisation.”
Israeli drag queen’s big break (Israel)
Starring in Israel’s first film about a transgender woman required not only theatrical bravery, but also dodging rocket attacks on set. Itay Hod at The Daily Beast writes about Tal Kallai, the gay star of Marzipan Flowers, an Israeli indie film about a trans woman. Kallai describes running for bomb shelters in the middle of filming and harnessing the tension of a war zone into his performance.
The road to gay marriage was no accident (United States)
Universal marriage equality may now seem like an inevitability in the United States, but it didn’t get there on its own. Marc Solomon’s new book, Winning Marriage, tells the story of the political movement that plotted its way from a single tenuous win in Massachusetts to gay marriage in 32 states today. Mark Joseph Stern at Slate writes how Solomon’s book corrects the misperception that gay marriage was inevitable and credits the political strategists who got the job done.
The curious case of the homophobic metrosexual real estate stars
Twin brothers Jason and David Benham lost their real estate show on HGTV because of a history of anti-gay protests. So why do they seem so gay? Huffington Post gay issues editor Michelangelo Signorile writes about the well-dressed twins and how they get away with being so gay and so anti-gay at the same time.
Read more at The Huffington Post.
Congress could add gay Republicans (United States)
The Republican Party is expected to add new faces to its majority in the House of Representatives today, and some of those faces may be gay. Richard Tisei in Massachusetts and Carl DeMaio in California are both in tight races against Democrats. Either could be the first gay Republican member of Congress since Jim Kolbe stepped down in 2007.
Photo Credit: Apple
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