Organized religion has perpetrated an outrageous and profoundly hurtful con. And an intimidated American media and a conservative mental health community has played the classic enabler role in underpinning this con leading the American people to actually think there is such a thing as an ex-gay. Ex-gays are simply men and women who have been enabled to return to the destructive and soul-crushing world of the Closet. The only difference is that this "reborn" closet is made of glass and allows us all to look in with horror.

Case in point: an obviously damaged and pathologically troubled Charlene Cothran finds herself standing before an adoring crowd of bigots and fundamentalist fanatics at a recent Americans For Truth About Homosexuality fund-raising banquet proclaiming that "the born gay claim is a vicious lie." Ms. Cothran, overwhelmed by a pathologically homophobic society succumbed to the self-delusions and self-loathing of the closet, albeit a glass closet , and now lives in a world of ignorance and dead souls.

Speaking before this modern version of a Ku Klux Klan rally, born again into the Closet, Ms. Cothran betrayed and humiliated her spiritual core and humanity.

An important thing happened in the gay world today: The New York Times told the shocking story of what happens when homophobia collides with gay men and lesbian as they grow old and begin to navigate health care systems for the elderly. It's not a pretty story, and it's one that has barely been told.

What is particularly heartening is that the Times chose to put this story and a photo on the front page of the print edition. The article is also the second most-emailed story on their Web site today.

NYT reporter Jane Gross uncovers the hardships that many of the estimated 2.4 million GLB folks over 55 face, from discrimination in health care facilities by both staff and non-gay residents, to real-life health consequences like depression and suicide that can result when there are no gay safety nets in place to help an older population that is often unable to defend itself against anti-gay people and institutions.

The article does explore some successes where programs and facilities have made room for, or been created especially for, gay seniors. These are still the exception, however.

There are useful links and resources on the Times' site for this story, but the most moving thing is a slide show narrated by Fred Riley and Emile Dufour, a gay couple who have been "together for two decades and married in 2004. But their default position, should they need nursing care," the article says, "will be to hide their gayness, as they did for half a lifetime, rather than face slurs and whispers."

"As strong as I am today," Mr. Riley said, "when I'm at the gate of the nursing home, the closet door is going to slam shut behind me."

Read the entire NYT article here, and click the image below to see and hear Fred and Emile's story.

Here's a big fat follow-up to Lesbians Are Fat And Andrew Sullivan Is A Big Puss. Once again, the reader comments have prompted me to do more work. This time it was a suggestion from my friend JAM to look into The Beauty Myth, by Naomi Wolf. Just to clarify, JAM is a "Queersighted reader friend", not a "real friend", like on MySpace.

Wolf's basic argument is that women are pressured to conform to an idealized concept of female beauty. Yes, thank you fashion magazines, beauty pageants, Paris Hilton, and Eileen Chaiken. Even Jane Fonda, who had women everywhere working out to her exercise videos in the 1980's, admitted years later that between takes she was barfing up breakfast. She also added something about "good genes", in other words, "Let's face it, I was born beautiful". Jane Fonda is actually trying to help women by finally telling the truth. We're not all born beautiful. Some of us are heavier than others because we didn't get Jane's "good genes". Some of us will never be able to exercise our our way into a size 4. Jane's one of the few aging actresses who hasn't nipped and tucked her face into a permanent expression of surprise. I like her.

Look, I lost 30 pounds and feel pretty good about myself, but if I saw "style guru" Tim Gunn at a party, I would crawl through a heating duct to avoid Tim's "finger to the mouth, old queen look of dissaproval". (I love Tim Gunn and old queens, please don't write in)

Gay Republican and lesbian obesity expert, Andrew Sullivan, also weighed in, Naomi Wolf style ... "My hunch is that without shallow, physically-oriented men to appeal to, many lesbians feel even less need to stay in shape than many straight women do." My hunch is that Andrew is right and my other hunch is that Andrew's mother should have told him not to scratch his ass on National TV.

PETA has a new GoVeg campaign featuring Alicia Silverstone, the new face (and body) of PETA. This drop-dead gorgeous beauty pretty much bares all in PETA's new risque "first-ever naked veggie testimonial". After watching the ad, I had to pick my jaw off the floor and commend PETA for bringing sexy back to such an earthy, crunchy issue.

I wonder if PETA is using the ad to target straight men and lesbians? Are gay men and straight women next? Picture it: Jake Gyllenhaal riding bareback at a Midwestern ranch to bring attention to the issue of meat. Oh wait, that's a movie of an entirely different sort ...

Got beef?

Well, if a naked Alicia Silverstone is asking you might have to reconsider.

I'm what many Americans refer to as a bleeding heart liberal. I have all the earmarks: a gay Jewish New Yorker, a baby boomer, grew up on the Lower East Side. I'm a true cliche. But like the American Civil Liberties Union--the Vatican City of bleeding heart liberals--I find it difficult--almost impossible--to vary my standards according to an individual's politics, philosophy or standing in society. Justice is justice. Rights are rights. And the Constitution is the Constitution.

And it is for this reason that I find myself increasingly troubled by the extremely hostile and contemptuous treatment and discussion of ex-gays and the ex-gay movement within the gay community. "We" tend to treat these individuals and their organizations as the religious, political and cultural enemy of truth and constitutional law. And I'm proposing that there's something very wrong with that.

America has come a very long way over the past few decades with regard to our views on mental illness. We understand that mental and physical diseases and disorders are equally legitimate and that both need to be recognized and treated. Patients should not be seen as pariahs or "guilty" as was once the case with Leprosy and AIDS. In fact medical science has made tremendous strides in recent years in the treatment of many mental conditions; we are gaining more and more understanding of the underlying environmental, chemical and hormonal imbalances that drive many psychiatric disorders.

As a kid I admit, I would've wanted to pull my finger nails out one-by-one than play sports. It's not that I didn't have athletic prowess -- I actually did -- but sports just didn't interest me.

But they DID interest my two older brothers who were both jocks with a capital J. It was fairly common for them and the neighborhood kids to be embroiled in a heated game of touch football or roller-hockey in front of our house. By contrast, MY only experience with roller-anything was watching Jane Krakowski whiz by me as a choo-choo train on Broadway in 'Starlight Express.'

But I've recently learned to appreciate what sports do for me physically, mentally and socially.

Two years ago, I read an article in Time Out New York about a group called Ski Bums, where gays and gals ski together on fantastic and highly-organized outings, sometimes for a day (local), sometimes for a weekend (kind of local), and sometimes for a week (kind of in Europe). Everything's done for you -- everything! -- and all you have to do is show up.

Now, I had never, EVER skied down a mountain before, let alone put ON a pair of skis. But the article got me excited as I'd always wanted to learn how to swoop down a snowy mountain; the fact that I'd be surrounded by a new group of gays was icing on the snowcap.

The article also added that Ski Bums was holding a mixer (something, I would find out later, they often do in-season) at the Manhattan gay bar, Therapy.

That was it! I was going to go solo and feel it out! (My therapist at the time had long "challenged" me to go to a bar by myself; I was happy that this would fulfill that challenge.)

So, I sucked it up and went. And when I couldn't find the welcoming faces of the Welcome Table, I back-peddled and left. I was disappointed that I'd allowed myself to get so intimidated by a group of strangers, and I vowed I wasn't going to be intimidated again. Oh no! I was going to go to their NEXT mixer, through hell or high water! So two weeks later, I showed up at Therapy again.

This time I found the table, uttered a fairly feeble yet upbeat, "I'm new here so you have to be nice to me," and was greeted with a fun, friendly, outgoing bunch of guys. And any fears I might have had were wiped away in, oh, about 2.6 seconds ...

I continue to be amazed and appalled by parents and teachers who think of themselves as decent, right-thinking, Constitution-abiding Americans and yet question the value and "morality" of gay-straight student alliances in our public schools. The stated purpose of these non-curriculum groups is to diminish and prevent gay bashing in order to support a safe and welcoming learning environment for queer students. It's not a complicated proposition. How much hatred, stupidity, ignorance and self-delusion must one harbor in order to question the rightness of it?

These children are unsafe in school. They are insulted, harassed, pushed down stairs, beaten in the lavatories and locker rooms, targeted for bullying in school yards and too often driven to dropping out, substance abuse and even suicide. And then Americans who believe themselves to be decent people, confronted with these facts, turn their backs and say "so what?"

These very same parents and teachers support tens of thousands of programs designed to help children protect themselves from rape, drugs, alcohol, pimps and child molesters.

While it's one thing to question the naturalness or morality of homosexuality, it's quite another to abide child abuse; and even if some parents and teachers view homosexuality as a "crime" do they really believe that these "criminal" children should be punished with violence and denied an education? Apparently so.

Medical researchers are going to subject healthy young black men to ctic acidosis (a buildup of acid in the blood that can lead to a medical emergency), nausea, vomiting, unusual muscle pain and/or weakness, a high potential for serious liver problems, an increased risk of kidney damage and potential bone damage,

Of course, this isn't Nazi Germany, so the medical experiments will be purely voluntary. The incentive to participate is simple, compelling and seductive. These otherwise healthy young black men who are either too macho or too lazy to use condoms can bareback their little hearts out on the chance that the "prophylactic" use of HIV treatment drugs such as Gilead Science's Viread and Truvada will prevent infection by the HIV virus.

The theory, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), suggests that taking anti- HIV drugs before exposure to the virus can protect a person against infection when they are exposed to it through sex or intravenous drug use. It's controversial because it may raise resistance to the drugs, making them less effective when infection happens. And since gay black men are the study subjects, the high risk of dangerous drug side effects seems to be of little concern to the United States government researchers.

``We don't yet have definitive proof this is effective,'' Dawn Smith, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told a reporter for Bloomberg News.

Unlike other experimental approaches to fighting HIV such as vaccines and microbicides, PrEP uses drugs that are already in use, such as Gilead Sciences Inc.'s Viread and Truvada. The technique has been shown to lower the risk of infection in monkeys.

According to the CDC, "The U.S. trial will target young homosexual black males because they are statistically more at risk of contracting HIV than their white peers."

Can you count the number of things that are wrong with this picture? Of course, if I were a true cynic, I might even applaud the pharmaceutical company for concocting a brilliant marketing scheme designed to dramatically expand sales. The HIV positive population is so very small, but the HIV negative population? Now there's a marketing opportunity beyond compare! Heck, even without an FDA approved indication, the publicity for this trial alone will drive thousands of affluent gay men into their doctor's offices for a lovely happy hour prophylaxis drug cocktail. Who needs condoms when I can sell my liver for a daily hit of Truvada?

Even though few people are paying attention, tomorrow, Tuesday, July 17, 2007 will be remembered as one of the most historic days in gay history. The American Psychological Association (APA) is embarking on the first review of its 10-year-old policy on counseling gays and lesbians.

The current policy, adopted in 1997, opposes any counseling that treats homosexuality as a mental illness, but does not explicitly denounce reparative or conversion therapy. At long last this may change and a ban may actually be imposed.

Coincidentally, this July is also the 70th Anniversary of the beginning of Germany's gay cleansing program when in response to new laws mandating conversion therapy for homosexuals, a nationwide hunt for queers was undertaken. Untold thousands of gay men were arrested by the Nazis. What followed was weeks and months of "protective custody" and transfers to mental asylums for "curative treatment" and eventual sentencing to concentration camps.

New documents recently released from German government archives have confirmed that under the American occupation, many gay men were still wearing their pink triangle patches on their prison uniforms as late as 1946-- because American-controlled courts had upheld the Nazi-era convictions for "unnatural behavior," despite the fact that all other Nazi-persecution convictions were dropped. Some gay men were still in prison (under the American occupation) in the early 1950s.

These same new documents also show that 54,000 gay men died at the hands of the Nazis in Germany, 7,000 of them in Nazi death camps.

In early May, I questioned the sense and sanity of sero-sorting, basing my protests on little more than science and logic.

A few weeks ago the United States Centers of Disease Control and Prevention released a report describing the fact that sero-sorting, the sophisticated gay poz pundit term for bare-backing, was in fact causing what common sense told us all along would be the case: the development of new and more virulent strains of sexually transmitted diseases.

Today's report puts some ugly and downright terrifying numbers on this phenomenon.

Syphilis, including a particularly lethal mutation, among gay and bisexual men in Los Angeles County has increased 365% since 2001, county health department officials say. Six in 10 gay and bisexual men with syphilis report being HIV-positive.

Andy, are you listening? 365% increase in the infection rate. Sixty percent of the new cases are among the HIV-positive.

This nation must find a way to deal more effectively with abusive and destructive behavior from religious groups and organizations. How can we honestly claim to be a responsible constitutional democracy when we allow absurd and perverse interpretations of ancient superstition-driven codes to justify child abuse, persecution of minorities and attacks on the civil rights of American citizens? Frankly, as the assumed leader of the free world, the fact that we're even discussing these issues should be profoundly disturbing to any and every American who believes in the Bill of Rights and the United States Constitution. And nowhere is this issue more abominable, more outrageous and more criminal than when it hurtfully and abusively intrudes on the lives of gay children--breaking their hearts, minds, spirits (and too often their very will to live) with the idiotic idea that sexual orientation is a choice and an evil choice at that. How can we allow adults who claim to be speaking in the name of Jesus tell queer children that their natural feelings of sexual orientation are abominable, sinful and must be driven out like some sort of foul infestation?

Perhaps every heterosexual who harbors this appalling belief and even worse attacks my rights and the well-being of gay children should be, by law, required to spend six months engaged in active gay sex so that they, themselves can make an informed choice.

Apparently a number of gay pundits--educated, responsible and sophisticated men--confused their certificates of HIV test results with degrees in medicine and science. Understandable--both are just paper with words and numbers and we all know how gay men hate to read anything other than Page Six and People magazine. And in their wisdom from their lofty positions of great influence these opinion leaders and trend setters determined that in defiance of logic, common sense and science they would inspire thousands of HIV positive gay men to abandon the bondage of latex, PVC and unsatisfying water-based lubricants and thanks to the brilliance of sero-sorting live in a fabulous and magical world of thoroughly safe unsafe sex.

Of course, some spoilsports such as myself vigorously challenged this bizarre and dangerous fantasy but given a choice between the wisdom of established and well-known queers like those pundits and sycophants to the condom industry such as myself, the media and many queers shed their sheaths, sero-sorted and provided a nasty soup in which spanking new sexually transmitted diseases could thrive and evolve. Oops.

Reuters reports that "A particularly serious form of the sexually transmitted bacterial disease syphilis has been detected in gay and bisexual U.S. men infected with the AIDS virus, federal health officials reported on Thursday."

You may or may not have watched the pilot of Curl Girls which aired on LOGO back in February of 2006. It was a documentary of lesbian surfers in a "Real World" type fashion, in other words dykes, drama and the occasional surfboard thrown into the mix. The hour-long special must have fared well because LOGO is introducing a six-episode reality series exploring the lives and loves of a group of lesbian and bisexual amateur surfers in L.A. called Curl Girls.

I moved out to LA recently for a few reasons, one being to take advantage of the excellent surfing conditions in SoCal, so as you can imagine, I'm dripping with excitement for the series to begin. There's nothing tastier than cute lesbian surfer girls in bikinis dripping wet with salt water....mmm!! Now don't get your expectations too high, the show is probably not going to include in-depth character revelations or philosophical story lines. I would give it a Baywatch-level caliber with enough lesbian drama to make you forget your own for the short 30 minutes that it will be airing each week.

Top 5 Things I Hope to See on Curl Girls:

President George W. Bush has announced his "intention to nominate James W. Holsinger, Jr., to serve as the 18th Surgeon General of the United States.

According to Mr. Bush: "As America's chief health educator, he will be charged with providing the best scientific information available on how Americans can make smart choices that improve their health and reduce their risk of illness and injury "

However, if you're a gay American you'd better duck.

Take note that Bush's choice for America's top quack rejects the scientifically-based positions of the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics that plainly state that so-called reparative or ex-gay therapy actually is a danger to an individual's health and well-being and may lead to clinically dangerous bouts of anxiety, depression and suicide. The new White House top doc responds to that with one big resounding "quack!"