Whenever I post something about High School Musical (like here and here), the world's tweens and teens lash out at me and leave vitriolic comments that are unintentionally hilarious in their utter seriousness, rank naivete, and sheer ferocity. Their anger is born not out of my disdain for HSM (I'm actually a fan and can karaoke to "Bet on It" like a 13-year-old Filipino girl), but out of a gross misinterpretation of my use of the word "gay." I don't use the word pejoratively (look it up, tweens!), but to young America "gay" is still the ultimate insult, one of the most horrible things you can call somebody or something.

When I describe a movie, a character, a dance sequence as "gay," it's a badge of honor--but kids don't see it my way. Behold some nasty comments:

* this article makes me want to punch you in the face.... go f*** yourself.

* don't call us tweenyboopers. or u'll get ur ass kicked by a bunch of tweenyboopers. so shut the hell up.

* when i figure out where you live i'm going to shove my school's flag pole up your ass!!

* Well your gaytarded

(For a more complete list of my favorite angry comments, go to my Bamboo Nation blog.)

Apparently, even those in our own community vilify the word "gay" and wish it to be stricken from colloquial speech. A homosexual college student (I assume he's in college from his e-mail address) posted this comment, referring to a post in which I point out that an HSM character is gay:

The gay community is outraged that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed AB 43, a bill that would have allowed same-sex couples to marry in California. Indeed, small protests in opposition to Schwarzenegger's decision were held in different parts of the state earlier this week--including in my own home, where I subjected myself to nude self-flagellation like that albino monk in The Da Vinci Code movie.

But after noticing how some conservatives and the religious right are covering the story, I think we would be remiss if we didn't recognize and applaud the legislative strides that were made last week in California. Progress is sometimes best measured by how upset the opposition is. And it's about time I put my whips away and my robe back on.

While CitzenLink (an offshoot of the ultra-right Focus on Family organization), for example, notes on its website that Schwarzenegger's veto is "a victory for traditional marriage," the group denounces the governor for passing "several bills detrimental to California families."

Mona Passignano, a spokesperson for Focus on the Family Action (another branch of Focus on Family), said that those other bills "will likely have a devastating impact on churches and Christian families in the state for years to come." This sentiment is echoed on similarly themed websites on the Internet.

The governor actually signed seven LGBT-friendly bills into law last week, after they were all passed by the Legislature:

In an effort to increase HIV awareness and promote safe sex in the UK, particularly among 16- to 24-year-olds, the BBC has just launched a campaign that includes an interactive website, events on school campuses, and videos that feature the central figure of the campaign: GI Jonny, a safe-sex crusader.

The first video, which stars GI Joe-like action figures, features graphic sexual moments and shots of certain choice body parts. When I first saw what Captain Bareback's "crotch cannon" could do, I didn't know what to think. But if that's how you get to young people, I guess that's how you get to young people. Thankfully, GI Jonny comes to the rescue, but when he pulls down his pants I was like "WTF?!"

The Central Christian Church of Wichita, Kansas, is so excited by its upcoming Clay Aiken Christmas concert that the former American Idol contestant gets an enthusiastic mention on the front page of the church's website. "Clay has an incredible voice as well as a heart to use it for the Lord," the site declares. "You won't want to miss this exceptional concert!"

However, the National Enquirer (c'mon, you read it in the checkout line too!) and a TV station--KSN, the NBC affiliate in Wichita--have managed to obtain a very interesting letter that the church drafted in July. Apparently, in a preemptive move, the church prepared a document that denies that Clay Aiken is gay. You see, just in case anybody inquiried about the singer's sexuality, they would have a letter ready to go in order to assuage people's fears--because, you know, when people decide whether to go to a concert or not, they need to be assured that the performer is not a homo. I mean, people don't want to catch a gay singer's cooties.... WHAT?!

According to KSN, the letter affirms Aiken's Christian beliefs, states that "he doesn't drink, smoke, swear, or womanize," and cites a Rolling Stone article in which Aiken clearly asserts that he is not gay. Whew! Crisis averted!

The heated debate about whether or not Piedra Vista High School in Farmington, New Mexico, should allow the formation of a Gay-Straight Alliance is over for now. QueerSighted reader Marshall e-mailed me within minutes of the school board's unanimous decision to let the club meet. But this is a bittersweet victory at best.

The board faced a tough choice. They couldn't just outright ban the club because they would be in violation of, you know, the law, and would face legal action by the ACLU. So they had to either remove all clubs from campus or allow the group to meet, much to the dismay of many in the community.

According to the local paper, The Daily Times, the school board's decision to allow the club wasn't really born out of a desire for tolerance and understanding. Are you ready to get queasy? Board Deputy Secretary Mike Isaacson said, "The choice to ban all clubs would eliminate any benefit we as a school board are currently contributing back to the community. Banning all clubs means we would ban all community access to the schools, which would include churches, the Boy Scouts, Special Olympics, Little League practices, powwows, etcetera. It would be unfortunate to let a small group of students, who believe they need to join this club, eradicate all the good we've been able to achieve by allowing the public to use our facilities."

Reading that quote again makes me want to throw up, really. Isaacson seems to suggest that there is no value to having a Gay-Straight Alliance, a group meant to promote tolerance at a high school that seems to need it. Just take a look at video clips of Piedra Vista students arguing against the club. One angry girl declares, "I don't want to be hanging around a whole bunch of queers." And an upset boy asserts, "If gay people want to be gay, they should go and get their own place to be gay!"

Perhaps it is that kind of hate that motivated some students to build enough courage to form a Gay-Straight Alliance in the first place. It's nice to know you have allies when you're facing that level of vitriol on a daily basis, whether it is spoken out loud or not.

After leaving last night's raucous Pansy Division concert at Spaceland in Los Angeles, my friend Gabriel insisted that I fulfill my duties as a journalist by going back to interview a band member or two, chatting with them about gay punk, and asking them what John Cameron Mitchell was doing in the audience. It was way past my bedtime and I was cranky, so I screamed, "Who the hell do you think I am?! Hunter S. Thompson?!"

But since I feel such a deep commitment to you, dear QueerSighted readers, I found myself back at the venue and talking with Pansy Division's founding members, Jon Ginoli and Chris Freeman. And while doing so, I remembered why I went to the concert in the first place--aside from their unabashedly gay lyrics and catchy music, Pansy Division holds a unique and important place in queer, as well as rock, history.

The first all-gay rock band ever, Pansy Division has always been unafraid to sing directly about gay sex, gay life, gay sex, gay relationships, and gay sex--oh, and did I mention gay sex?--and they've done so with infectious pop-punk appeal. They first gained notoriety in the mid-'90s after they were asked to tour with Green Day, right when Dookie had captured the hearts, minds, and wallets of the public.

As expected, performing for Green Day's fan base met with mixed reactions. After all, no one goes to a rock show expecting to hear songs like "C***sucker Club," "Fem in a Black Leather Jacket," and "James Bondage," especially coming out of the mouths of men. While they were occasionally pelted with objects on stage, they gained new fans--many were high school kids, who didn't fit in with their straight peers and who didn't align with showtune-loving stereotypes, and they finally found musicians they could identify with and embrace.

If you were to believe the Okeechobee County School Board in Florida, gay-straight alliances on high school campuses are a hotbed of salacious activity and a forum for explicit discussion about dirty, nasty gay sex--because, as you know, that's what gay-straight clubs are all about: your peers pressuring you to have same-sex intercourse and lots of it.... Okay, well, the board didn't say all those things exactly, but I can read between the lines.

When a student met administrative resistance after she tried to form a gay-straight alliance at Okeechobee High School, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on her behalf. Earlier this year, a judge ruled that the club could meet until the case is settled, which won't be until at least March.

In a preemptive strike to ban any future gay-straight groups on campus, the school board decided this week that from now on any clubs based on sexual orientation are not allowed. Superintendent Patricia Cooper stated in a memo that the policy change would "assure that student clubs and organizations do not interfere with the School Board's abstinence-only sex education policy."

Her statement makes me roll my eyes for so many reasons.

We all know by now how gay the High School Musical movies are. So Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the films are set, must be awash in a cloud of homosexual tolerance. However, the radius of all that gay love does not extend as far as the town of Farmington, which is about 200 miles south of Albuquerque.

A proposed Gay-Straight Alliance club at Piedra Vista High School has sparked citywide controversy. Sixty-one percent of polled townsfolk oppose the club; hundreds of people have shown up at meetings to shed tears over the matter; angry students staged a sit-in; and the ACLU has gotten involved by informing the principal that the school has a legal obligation to allow the club.

Where's the love, New Mexico? Forget that--where's the acceptance? Hell--we'll even go for reluctant tolerance. (As in: I hate you, but, fine, I'll tolerate you anyway.) Did you learn nothing from your fellow citizens in Albuquerque when they danced and sang "We're All in This Together" and "All for One"?

Although I made a personal vow to not subject QueerSighted's regular readers to more High School Musical madness, the phenomenon has just jumped back into my consciousness because the Los Angeles dates of the national touring stage version of HSM have been announced (December 12 to 23, 2007, at the Kodak Theatre, with plenty of dates in other cities). Now, this stage production is not to be confused with the High School Musical concert tour or the High School Musical ice show or the High School Musical cult indoctrination. (Okay, I don't think that last event exists, but it might as well.) This is a huge stage musical with professional actors, a new book, and extra songs added. Oh, yeah, and it's gayer than the movie.



As you may remember, I mentioned that there are plenty of hints in the HSM movies about how the character of Ryan Evans is gay. The angry tweens who left vitriolic comments to my guest post about the HSM sequel were appalled that I would suggest such a thing, and they (understandably) did not know what I meant when I used the word "pitcher."

I had heard that the stage version of HSM was less coy about Ryan Evans's homosexuality. And legitimate news sources have confirmed that this is true, which makes the prospect of spending my hard-earned AOL cash to go see the stage show seem far more enticing.

If heterosexual parents--like Britney and Kevin--were held to the same standard as gay and lesbian parents, imagine the crushing blow to the therapy business nationwide. Imagine if the same scrutiny paid to gay and lesbian couples looking to foster or adopt was paid to straight couples? You'd have an unprecedented epidemic of well-adjusted adults. It would be downright disgusting--a nation plagued by happy, family-oriented, nurturing human beings. What divorce lawyer would want to see that!!??

The news from the University of Amsterdam: Yet another study and more money and research time spent to prove that queer parents turn out children just as well-adjusted as do straight parents. The only difference the study found between lesbian couples and straight couples? Mothers are better at parenting than fathers; and two mothers are more committed parents than a mother and a father. Now there's a shocker. Of course, my mother was Medea...so there are exceptions. It's only through divine intervention that I'm still alive.

A review of parenting studies soon to be published by New York's Yeshiva University concludes that children with two supportive parents fare better than children with only one parent or none, but this same review also found that among children with only one supportive parent, it did not matter whether that parent is a mother or a father. In other words, what matters is that parents be supportive; sexual orientation and gender are mostly irrelevant.

I spend so much time bashing bigots, morons and fools that I often overlook the heroes among us. But Travis Price and David Shepherd, two straight high school seniors from a Canadian high school in Halifax are getting my newly created Queer Heroes Award of 2007--even thought the year is far from over.

Travis and David witnessed bullies going after a gay 9th grader who apparently was "flaunting" his homosexuality by wearing a pink polo shirt to school.

Our heroes, Travis and David were furious and decided to do something about it.

"I just figured enough was enough," Shepherd told a reporter for Canadian national television. So David and Travis went to a nearby discount store and bought 50 pink shirts, including tank tops, to wear to school the next day.

Then the two boys went online to e-mail classmates to get them on board with their anti-bullying crusade that they dubbed a "sea of pink." A tsunami of support poured in the next day. Not only were dozens of students outfitted with the discount tees and tanks, but hundreds of students showed up wearing their own pink clothes, some head-to-toe. In fact, the school estimates that more than half of the school's 830 students wore pink in support of the 9th grader.

Whenever gay characters pop up in mainstream entertainment where gay characters are not expected and they're not meant to be stereotypical butts of jokes, I'm always a little bit shocked. I saw two movies in the theater this past weekend, and, when things suddenly (albeit briefly) turned a little bit gay, I audibly gasped. Gay characters that are casually stitched into the fabric of a Hollywood film are still so rare these days that, for a number of reasons, it takes my breath away.



In the so-so teen flick Sydney White, which transports the Snow White fairy tale to a college campus, our heroine (played with comic verve and charm by Amanda Bynes) attempts to become president of the sorority- and fraternity-run student council. Sydney's campaign hinges on her effort to reach out to the different cultural, religious, and ethnic groups that study in the shadow of the all-white, all "right" sororities and fraternities that rule the school. At one point, Sydney and her campaign helpers (the seven "dorks") can be seen cheering a tall, proud transgender student (billed as "Danny the Tranny") at a GLBT poetry night. And I gasped.

Some days, I fear that I'm repeating myself; suffering from broken record syndrome. But I suppose in a war there's a certain redundancy to each battle. The geography and the names may change but the struggle pretty much looks the same. I also keep at it because I do believe that part of the enemy's strategy is to wear us down on multiple fronts until we just shut up, accept our second class citizenship and crawl obediently back into some national closet--and I for one am not about to do that.

But some days I really don't want to write, I just want to find one of these hateful morons and give him a good old-fashioned punch in the nose. It's violent, it's wrong and it's immature, but it would feel so yumalicious!

The latest blood spilt is over the battle for California's queer kids. Several California-based and national "Christian" groups are pounding on the California governor's door demanding that he veto a new state law that has successfully made its way through the California state legislature. The new law would ban discrimination against queers in California schools. The "Christians" are also demanding that the governor censure the California Parent Teachers Association (PTA) which has "endorsed the demand to shows gays positively."

One of these so-called Christian groups, the Campaign for Children and Families is claiming that a ban against a Christian or Muslim's right to condemn and ostracize children who choose perverted and sinful lifestyles is censorship and an attack on religious freedom. Truly Godly children should have the right to set their queer peers straight in every way possible.

Homophobia is a beautiful thing; it builds bridges between people who might otherwise not talk to one another. In fact, not since various Christian denominations rallied together to defend the white man's right to keep black slaves have we seen such unity and cooperation between Christians groups.

A recently formed coalition of national and California Christian organizations is mustering its forces to fight a discrimination lawsuit filed by the parents of two lesbians who were expelled from a Lutheran High School for coming out. The parents of the lesbians are claiming that the school should not be exempt from California anti-discrimination laws. The school and the Christian groups are arguing that Christian schools should have the right to expel students who violate standards of Christian behavior. Like "hate thy neignbor?"

The Christian Legal Society, the Alliance Defense Fund and the Association of Faith-Based Organizations filed a petition in early September asking the judge to add them to the lawsuit in support of the Lutheran school.

Attorneys arguing for the school and the various associations claim that Christian schools should not be subject to California law when it violates their beliefs.

Now since the behavior that is being deemed a violation of Christian behavior is actually questioned in the Hebrew Bible, one must also assume that Christian schools are expelling students who eat shrimp, mix wool and cotton fabrics, engage in work or sports on the Sabbath, disobey their parents, lie or engage in idolatry.

No one questions the need for or value of magazines or websites catering to straight men and women, but gay websites are often deemed pornographic or "adult content" simply because they have a gay perspective--sometimes on something as "adult" as gardening or literature or computer games-- and now they're even being targeted by homophobic hackers.

Gaygamer.net was gay bashed after weeks of hate language and Internet abuse--just the way it happens in real life. First they tease you, then they insult you and then they show up late at night and crack open your skull with a baseball bat. In the virtual world they crash your site

For those of you--like me--who don't give a damn about computer games, you might not know that gaygamer is a very popular and successful news site for gamers with a gay perspective--and that has outraged one or more straight (or closeted) gamers.

Joystiq reports: "After a series of hate speech incidents and forum postings to gaygamer.net, the site was taken offline by a set of denial of service attacks. Flynn DeMarco, the site's owner, said things started going wrong toward the end of last week until the site's host, GoDaddy.com, finally took the site offline until the attacks could be stopped."

As of now, the site is back up and the hackers have been blocked.