In the Vlad TV interview above, rapper turned singing AutoTune addict T-Pain calls homophobia "terrible" and "weird," says he doesn't "fuck with" people who shun gays, and claims to know artists who won't work with Frank Ocean because he once wrote a Tumblr post about falling in love with a man. Throughout, T-Pain is seemingly tipsy and decidedly animated, which makes his entire spiel delightful. I mean, there's plenty to get offended over here, if you wish to nitpick, so don't fret. T-Pain will give you something to do if you're bored and looking to get mad.

Alternate headline: Straightsplaining: NFL Edition.

The 2014 Winter Olympics are about to be overtaken by Johnny Weir, the ex-Olympic figure skater now working for NBC during this year's Games. Absorb his above look, because it's more fun than anything that has happened in Sochi so far.

Evangelical conservative radio personality Bryan J. Fischer is a batshit sound-bite machine for the Lord. And he would like you to know how much he loves black men, even if you can't compute that in your "black heart."

If you want to know about gay people—their lives, their desires, their ideas, their cultures—listen to gay people. If you want to know about straight people, listen to straight people talking about gay people.

"They don't want to see or be seen, only to touch and to be touched in a place where nobody knows them." Jeff Sharlet's long study on the lot of gays in Russia on the eve of the Olympics, "Inside the Iron Closet," is online now. Go, go read.

Last night, the U.K.'s Channel 4 aired Hunted, a wide-ranging documentary about homophobia in Russia. Its biggest coup was achieving access to the inner workings of Occupy Pedophilia, the largest vigilante group responsible for the hunting down of, physical abuse against, and public humiliation of gay people (predominantly gay men). Though such footage has been making the rounds, this is the first time I've seen the planning and luring process of the group. Via the third-party cameras, we also get a sense of how long such an ordeal lasts (an hour). Though mild in violence, the footage above is as hard to watch as the rest of this stuff, so proceed with caution.

Here's Vogue Knights, a short documentary on the contemporary voguing/ball scene in Hell's Kitchen. Paris is still burning.

Of the five primary performers during the Grammys gay-marriage extravaganza last night, three—Macklemore, Ryan Lewis, and Madonna—count as gay allies. (They're all more or less openly heterosexual.) One—Mary Lambert—is an actual, open homosexual. And the last—Queen Latifah—is... well, we all know what she is. She just won't say it.

This account of an affair between two men who played together on the Washington Redskins in the late '60s/early '70s is heartbreaking. It comes from the NFL Network's episode of A Football Life profiling player Jerry Smith, who remained publicly closeted for his entire life (Smith died of AIDS in 1986).

Yesterday, Esquire's culture blog posted a review of the new HBO show that is just like your life or your friend's life or the life of that guy in your office whose shoes are always just a little nicer than they have to be, Looking. In "A Straight Man's Guide to HBO's Looking," writer Mick Stingley determines that the show about a handful of weed-paced gay friends in San Francisco "commits the heinous sin of being gay and boring." Stingley's bio that follows his piece states that he "loves Tom Wolfe and rock and roll and lives with his fiancée in Queens." He seems to have a lot in common with those gay guys on the show with the exception of the gay thing. Boring is the universal human experience.

Vladimir Putin jumps on the "I'm not prejudiced, I have gay friends" bandwagon. Doesn't that count as propaganda?

Vladimir Putin should probably stop talking about gay people. In an interview today, the Russian president aimed to downplay fears that gay men and women will be in danger during the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi, but instead he might have done the opposite.

The View's Sherri Shepherd, who once said she "didn't know" if the Earth is flat, has this to say about gays: "I might not agree with your lifestyle, but I love you. You may not agree with my lifestyle, but you love me." Actually, Sherri, I don't.

It's not easy being a TV show about gay men in 2014. Thanks in part to the power of the internet as a platform for activism and outrage, the responsibilities of representation have never seemed more urgent, or more complicated. To appeal to your gay audience—built-in and notoriously loyal—you need to be realistic. To appeal to everyone else—whose patronage will ultimately make or break—you can't be too gay. The ideal is something satisfying without the ick factor, something like, and about as likely as, a spontaneous orgasm.

Dozens of gay men in Nigeria reportedly have been arrested under the country's new Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act, which sentences people to jail for 14 years for being married to a person of the same sex, and 10 years for belonging to gay-oriented groups. This is disgusting.

Here are two notable essays about outing in the wake of the latest Aaron Schock gay allegations. One, by HuffPost Gay Voices' Michaelangelo Signorile, is very smart. The other, by Time Ideas' Brandon Ambrosino, is not. You decide what you want to read.

"Cultural appropriation" is usually understood as a one-way street: A privileged outsider steals from a disenfranchised group and eats the profits. This is an easy enough narrative, but the truth is generally more complicated—see Little Richard's gratitude for Elvis Presley as an "integrator." Or take James Franco and Travis Mathew's new film Interior. Leather Bar, a fascinating instance of cultural "appropriation" that feels like cultural exchange.

Though it's as chic as a marching band and demands that you do that dorky dance along to it (a dance without any acknowledgement of one's hips, no less), perhaps you are like me and find the Village People's 1978 disco anthem "Y.M.C.A." endearing anyway. A feat of subversion that is still routinely played at the heterosexual pride-oriented outings better known as sporting events, the song has kids from 2 to 92 obliviously pantomiming letters along to barely veiled lyrics that tell of public man-on-man butt sex in the insanely debauched pre-AIDS era. In terms of gay culture penetrating the mainstream without the mainstream's knowledge, "Y.M.C.A." stands virtually alone in its reach and stealthiness (though Madonna's "Vogue" comes close—ball culture reached as far as Stephanie Tanner).

Earlier this week, BuzzFeed LGBT editor Saeed Jones fed the name of his boss, BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith, into a website called Gay or Straight and tweeted out the result: