From the AP:

Last week, a group of six New Yorkers were on a Caribbean vacation in St. Maarten. Two of them were brutally beaten — one, Dick Jefferson, a 51-year-old top producer at the CBS Evening News, is out of the hospital but now has a titanium plate in his head; the other, a 25-year-old researcher there, remains in intensive care with brain injuries. Why were they beaten? Because they're gay, and the attackers had earlier that night been thrown out of a bar for heckling Smith and his boyfriend, Justin Swenson. ABCNews.com did a thorough story earlier this week, which made an interesting point:

Jake Gyllenhaal's brain-liquifying levels of dreaminess have made him a universal object of desire, with every surfacing photograph of him and companion used as definitive evidence in the ongoing "He's on our team!" tug-of-war. (Even the canine community claimed him when he was snapped canoodling with an underage puggle.) Something about the coziness between Jake and friend Austin Nichols in a series of photos taken at a Lakers game a few months ago really set people's Jakedar a-beeping. Today, the NY Daily News reports a rep insists they are "just friends":

Saturday night was LA's chapter of the GLAAD Media Awards, and the gay-friendly celebrities showed up in droves. (The gay-closeted celebrities, on the other hand, chose to skip again this year.) Moments before this picture of Teri Hatcher and Nicolette Sheridan doing the lezzie lip mash was snapped, Hatcher was overheard asking her Desperate Housewives co-star, "Wanna know what Ryan Seacrest tastes like?" Our ironically titled Defamer Correspondent for Anti-Defamatory Awards Shows sends in this conveniently bulleted report:

Yesterday, we post-mortemed the premature departure of American Idol contestant Mandisa from the show, asking whether her widely rumored hostility towards adherents of sex involving more than one set of testicles played a part. In their interview with the singer, The Advocate pushed the large-and-no-longer-in-charge diva into a corner, until she finally coughed up the ugly gay-hate within:

When vocal powerhouse/Jesus aficionado Mandisa was kicked off of America Idol last night, Fox's ratings monster continued a long-standing tradition of eliminating a plus-sized diva well before her time. Of course, this is hardly the end of the road for the singer: A fulfilling career of performing on gay cruise ships is hers if she should so choose. But since a report surfaced in The Advocate linking her to a prominent anti-gay writer, followed by a suspiciously worded introduction to an Idol performance in which she said, "This song goes out to everyone who wants to be free. Your addiction, lifestyle, or situation may be big, but God is bigger," many have been whispering that Mandisa may have alienated her core audience before she even built one. TMZ.com, clearly frustrated at not having the contestant around anymore to video-stalk as she tries on clothes at Ashley Stuart, uses the iffy tabloid algebra of "rumor/outcome=connection" to blame her downfall on her alleged anti-gay affiliations:

Click to enlarge.

It may be better in the Bahamas, but not if you happen to be a budding island homosexual looking to spend a few hours in a darkened theater, enthralled in a tale of forbidden cowboy love. A Bahamian government decency board has chosen to ban Brokeback Mountain:

We wish you could, too, you hacky copywriters. We really do.

From an email sent to Columbia's job-recruiting email list with the subject "JPMorgan Recruiting Event for LGBT Students":

We attended the GLAAD Media Awards last night, which are designed to "recognize and honor mainstream media for their fair, accurate and inclusive representations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community." It was a fun evening — mostly because of the free-flowing booze and the attractive boys — but it also left us feeling conflicted. How so?

While there's been a certain amount of debate in the media concerning the accuracy and fairness of online, user-contributed encyclopedia Wikipedia, we've got to say that any resource that provides us with a list of who the gays are goes right to the top of our Favorites folder. If only someone could cross-reference it with the list of Jews, we'd pretty much be in heaven.

So we went up to midtown last night for Showtime's big premiere of Liza With a Z, the 1972 television special that hasn't been seen in more than three decades. It was — how to describe? — an experience. Some thoughts, in more or less the order they occurred to us:

This morning MSNBC gossip Jeannette Walls considers the problem of notorious Scientologist John Travolta agreeing to play Edna Turnblad in the forthcoming movie of Hairspray, given that Scientology is pretty notoriously antigay:

The ongoing X-Men saga has basically been one long, overreaching superhero allegory for growing up gay in an unwelcoming world: Imagine Brokeback Mountain, but replace Jack and Ennis' forbidden love with the mutant ability to singe sheep with their eye-lasers. With Hollywood's hottest new web presence Brett Ratner's third installment, X-Men: The Last Stand (you can view the trailer here), the metaphor reaches its natural conclusion: the "curing" of these mutant teens of what makes them different. In a roundtable discussion on SciFi.com featuring the film's leads, things got rather heated between Ian McKellen and co-star Hugh Jackman when Jackman argued that perhaps curing one's self of mutation isn't necessarily such a bad thing:

Maybe a clue as to why Crash beat Brokeback Mountain last night can be found in the Oscars' ratings themselves: The audience for the "gay Oscars" was down significantly from last year, making it the second-lowest rated Oscars in history, behind only the year Chicago arguably a gayer movie than Brokeback, Capote and Transamerica combined took top honors. Could The Gays be ratings poison for Oscar?

If the current zeitgeist can be summed up in a single movie Brokeback Mountain then it could arguably be further distilled into a single, highly recognizable bar of music. The first seven notes of composer Gustavo Santaolalla's melancholy main theme, "The Wings," made us cry (the final scene!) and laugh (it set off every beloved parody). The only thing it seemed incapable of doing, however, was make us shake our booty. Never underestimate, however, the magical disco powers of The Gays:

This just arrived in our inbox — it was shot at Kim's Underground on St. Mark's — with the subject line "Mislabeling."

"Connecting media people to new opportunities — and to each other." For a fee.

Yeah, that's the problem with Olympics coverage, that we just don't know enough about Johnny Weir's sex life.