One Billboard Outside Minneapolis The message was simple: “Michele Bachmann, NO. — God.” However cryptic to outsiders, everyone in Minnesota knew exactly what it 
meant. The former congresswoman and darling of the Tea Party had made quite a show of deciding whether to run for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Al Franken, telling televangelist Jim Bakker that she was asking the Lord for advice. And up went the billboard, complete with an image of a hoary God. When Bachmann decided not to run, Minnesota Public Radio ran the headline: “Michele Bachmann: No sign from God so no run for Senate.” The billboard had been paid for through crowdfunding, so it may be said that not God but the people had spoken.
Rope-a-Dope In the ever-growing annals of clergymen caught in the hot seat, here’s a case in which the hot seat was the front seat of a car, where a pastor in Pennsylvania was caught with a naked young man who was tied up with nylon rope. As so often in these matters, the pastor’s explanation was far more BTW-worthy than the original story: “I was counseling a young man with a drug problem, okay?” stated Pastor George Gregory of Waterfront Christian Community Church to a reporter with the local CBS affiliate. “It did turn strange, but it wasn’t my doing, okay?” Then he added, artfully enough: “I won’t deny that he began to take his clothes off and propositioned me, but I will deny, on a stack of Bibles with God as my witness, that I did nothing.” Get it? “I deny … that I did nothing.” But we’re probably giving Gregory too much credit here, as he went on to admit that he and the other man “meet up from time to time to play with each other”—totally shooting down the bit about counseling. As for Gregory’s claim that the other man was entirely the instigator while he did nothing to respond, um, there is that small matter of the nylon rope.
Just Do It The notion that bondage in a car could be “therapy” in the last story calls to mind the antics of “ex-gay therapy,” whose practitioners are known to use bizarre techniques, including nudity, in their quest to turn gay people straight. The latest case involves one Melvyn Iscove, a 72-year-old psychiatrist in Toronto who’s been found guilty of having sex with two of his male patients starting in their late teens. It seems Dr. Iscove subscribes to an archaic Freudian idea that homosexual fantasies are repressed desires that need to be brought to the surface—which he interprets to mean: acted out in real life. And so, the rest of the trial was all about the therapy sessions and how they started with sexual fantasies and ended with sexual realities (number of times mutually masturbated, had oral sex, etc.). Now, the idea that enacting one’s fantasies will make them go away seems wrong on the face of it, though it does bring to mind Oscar Wilde’s famous quip: “The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.” He forgot to add that the effect is temporary. In the case at hand, the plaintiffs continued to visit Dr. Iscove for years before concluding that the medicine wasn’t working; their fantasies were as gay as ever.
Ode to Shiller The revolving cast of characters in Trump’s outer orbit hasn’t included too many gay ones, but who could forget Milo Yiannoupolos, the glamorous, openly gay politico who just last year held a powerful position at Breitbart News, got a $250,000 book deal with Simon & Schuster, and had the ear of you-know-who? But then a tape surfaced in which Milo made light of sex between men and underage boys—that most radioactive of topics—and it all collapsed into one big Warholian heap. Milo had been accepted into that world as the token gay guy who made it seem possible to both look cool and love Trump. So, having lost everything—the news job, the book deal, the ear—Milo has resurfaced shilling vitamins on Infowars for the arch-homophobe conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, whose rants include a recurring hallucination about lesbians killing women to eat their brains and gay men transmitting HIV as part of a Satanic plot. Meanwhile, in a separate story, Alex Jones is being sued by an ex-staffer named Rob Jacobson for sexual harassment over a thirteen-year period, during which Jones’ nickname for Jacobson was “Beefcake.” The latter says in his complaint that he felt Jones “was grooming me for homosexual sex.” So perhaps Milo was hired at an opportune time for Jones as he explores this new side of himself, who can say?
“How Gay Were the Olympics?” asked a headline in LGBTQ Nation. The easy answer is: the gayest ever. For starters, this time around the athletes came out beforethe 
games began. Of the fifteen out Olympians, eleven were lesbians, including U.S. speed skater Brittany Bowe, whose team won Bronze in their final race. Adam Rippon, the flamboyant figure skater who won a Bronze in the team event, became something of a media sensation as he shared his wisdom about competition and life in general on every TV outlet that would listen. Early on in the fortnight, slopestyle skier Gus Kenworthy, who won Silver in 2014, posed for a kiss with his boyfriend on worldwide TV. And here he is on the Ellenshow showing off a bruise he received in a fall. As for Ms. DeGeneres’ demeanor, either she’s particularly squeamish about bruises or the nearly naked Kenworthy is a bit more of an eyeful than she bargained for.
