G.B.F. is a good-natured teen comedy about prom queens in search of gay best friends. Its depictions of affection are chaste and its language is clean. So why does it have an R rating?

"I'm very proud if Grindr has forced us to up up our game. To brush our teeth. Comb our hair. Eat right. Go to the gym. Be a healthy person. Cut back on the smoking. Cut back on the bad things and look your best. We're men. We visualize." - Grindr CEO, Joel Simkhai

I know what you're thinking: Adam Levine needs no defense. The Maroon 5 frontman/Voice judge/sometime actor just won what is among the best-known and most meaningless of all of America's meaningless annual awards, People's Sexiest Man Alive. He does a fine job of defending himself, as he did in his self-mocking "acceptance speech" on last night's episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live.

The Daily Caller’s Patrick Howley published a column today about how cool and subversive and authentic gay culture used to be, before they started to demand things like equal rights and legal recognition of their marriages. Howley explains:

A few years ago, I was idly talking to a group of friends about Andrew Holleran's 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance. The book elegantly describes the gay culture of Manhattan and Fire Island at the time it was written, and in doing so shares some sentiment that reads less than politically correct to modern sensibilities. I lamented this—specifically some race jokes, which I think are supposed to be taken as straightforward humor—to the people that I was talking to, and one of them gently challenged my complaint. "I think that you have to take what you can from any piece of pop culture and ignore the bad stuff," she said with a shrug.

It's just a coincidence that LGBT History Month occurs during our culturally appointed Scariest Time of the Year—it’s positioned to coincide with National Coming Out Day (October 11) and to commemorate the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which took place October 14, 1979, not with All Hallow's Eve.

Since its debut earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, Abdellatif Kechiche's eventual Palm d'or-winning Blue Is the Warmest Color has been one of the most discussed movies of the year. The three-hour French-language film features about 10 minutes of explicit lesbian sex over three scenes (including one that stretches on for almost seven minutes). Blue's sex caused it to be banned in Idaho, as well as unrest among its lead actresses, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux. (Seydoux told New York magazine that she was asked to do things in the movie that made her feel "like a prostitute.")

The second in Stephen Fry's gay-centric, two-part Out There documentary series aired last night in England. (The first, which featured Fry frying an ex-gay therapist, aired earlier this week.) In Part 2, we finally saw the results of Fry's publicized March meeting with Vitaly Milonov, the man commonly credited as the writer of the anti-"gay propaganda" law that's played a major role in Russia's current wave of gay oppression. Fry didn't hold back this time and was, in fact, much less polite than when he met with the ex-gay quack.

"I'm not here to have a fight," says Stephen Fry of his interview with National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality's Dr. Joseph Nicolosi on BBC Two's gay-themed Out There show. Instead, Fry lets the quack undo himself with his own words, and it's glorious.

Last night, Sex Box premiered on Channel 4 in England, apparently confusing a bunch of Twitter users in the process. That's weird because the premise is simple: A couple enters a room in a box onstage and has sex while a panel of sex experts (including the U.S.'s own Dan Savage) discusses sex amongst each other. When the disheveled, blissful couple emerges, they join the conversation for a perfectly cringey interrogation. Supposedly, having sex before such a talk opens people up (emotionally, that is). Also, this is a show and shows need a gimmick.

Last night, HBO aired Valentine Road, a documentary about the 2008 murder of Lawrence ("Larry") King, a 15-year-old gay student who asked then-14-year-old Brandon McInerney to be his Valentine. The day after, McInerney brought a gun to school and shot King twice in the head in a computer lab. King died two days later.

"A lot of my hair stylists and my beauty team that I work with are gay so I hang out with gays a lot, and I just think they're absolutely thrilling and adorable and hilarious." - Britney Spears

When L'Inconnu du lac (Stranger By the Lake) is right, it’s so right that it’s horrifying.

In August, Russian-language art website published two satirical ebooks spoofing Russia's new anti-gay propaganda" laws, Homosexuality for Kids and Lesbianism for Kids. Now, they along with their entire blogging platform, is apparently banned in Russia.

Before performing his song "Home Again," Elton John read a speech about Liberace (the subject of the multi-nominated HBO movie Behind the Candelabra) that he clearly did not write and maybe had never seen before he read it on live television.

A few weeks ago, I found myself in the same room as the only person that I've ever physically fought. It was a fight that I’d gone into begrudgingly and for the sake of appearances—because I wasn’t going to let another guy hit me in front of a group of people without hitting him back. It was prove-yourself theater, and though two of us were in the cast, it was my one-man show.

If you haven't been paying attention to the saga of hip-hop DJ Mister Cee's sex with men who dress like women, this quote from Cee will help catch you up:

Here's further proof that every single that happened at this year's MTV Video Music Awards was a culturally significant moment worth pondering (or that every culturally significant moment worth pondering happened at the VMAs).

When Zach Gibson made the decision to come out on Facebook, he expected to hear from his mother. What he didn't expect was to hear his mom say "I'm so proud of you."

"If you want sex too, it's a gay man's paradise. If you want a relationship, that may be more difficult," says a citizen not of Hell's Kitchen, but Pakistan in this surprising BBC report on the country's gay scene.