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Roll Over Hugh  You wouldn’t expect to see a roast turkey on the cover of Vegetarian Times—or a gay man on the cover of Playboy. But there he was on last October’s issue: YouTube star Bretman Rock, who appears in a bunny suit and a bare chest. The religious Right reacted on cue: “Playboy has gone from degrading women to erasing women,” said a spokesperson, prompting a feminist writer to point out the irony of their complaining about the absence of a woman being degraded on the cover of Playboy. But the more interesting question is what this decision says about the magazine’s readership. Despite a 2019 rebranding to feature more artistic and less explicitly sexual content, Playboy’s readership is still overwhelmingly straight men, and it’s their gaze that sells magazines. So apparently the sight of a gender-bending gay man is not a turnoff at all for many readers. Indeed that inference was not lost on the Christian spokesperson, who worried that this will further muddle the division between the sexes and could cause some men to drift toward “nonbinary” options. Ah, the fragility of heterosexuality.

Disaster Man  After 55 years as host of The 700 Club, televangelist Pat Robertson has at last stepped down. He’s best remembered in the LGBT community for his incessant attempts to connect natural disasters with gay rights—always after the fact, of course, when the prophesying is easy. What was so galling—or entertaining—was the sheer zaniness of the connections he’d posit. For example, when Hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans in 2005, he didn’t reach for the obvious “Sodom and Gomorrah” sermon about the Big Easy. Instead, he pointed out that Ellen DeGeneres was hosting the Emmys that year, and Ellen hailed from New Orleans, and she’s a lesbian, and God hates lesbians. QED! Sure, sometimes the link between a disaster and the place destroyed was a bit more direct, as when he attributed a hurricane that hit Orlando to Disney World’s pro-gay policies. Such a connection between disasters and gayness would lead one to assume that the gayest areas would be the most vulnerable to God’s wrath. So, one researcher ran some numbers to test this hypothesis in a piece that appeared in our Sept.-Oct. 2001 issue. What Janis Walworth found was that the states with the highest percentage of LGBT people were significantly less likely to be hit with disasters, while those with a low proportion, many in the South, were especially disaster-prone. Twenty years later, the disasters are coming faster and more ferociously than ever, and God’s wrath has nothing to do with it.

U.S. Exports Robertson’s wrathful God is also on hand in Ghana these days as the country debates a law described as “the most homophobic document the world has ever seen.” The bill is the handiwork of Brian Brown and the American-led evangelical World Congress of Families (WCF). Homosexuality is already illegal in the Christian-majority country, but the new bill will increase the maximum prison sentence from three to five years. What’s novel about the Ghana bill is that it will put people at risk merely for associating with LGBT people, which led one paper in Ghana to state that it “compels Ghanaians to police gender and sexuality in their homes, workplaces, and everyday lives.” It’s the same kind of creative thinking that the WCF and its allies brought to Russia when Putin was looking for a way to suppress homosexuality without banning it outright. The solution was the 2013 ban on so-called “homosexual propaganda,” i.e. any advocacy or defense of LGBT rights, which effectively shut down any gay rights movement. Clearly the reason these American crusaders have gone abroad is because North America hasn’t proved fertile ground for these efforts to persecute LGBT people—so far.