Football Players “No Gay Thursday”

I saw this story on my local Philadelphia news channel before I found the link. It happened at a suburban Philadelphia school…nowhere near New Hope…and it’s been making headlines for several reasons. One of which is that it’s morally offensive to everyone, mainly the victims. And it’s a big insult to gay men.

In short, high school football players allegedly got caught hazing younger football players.

According to this source…

 Three 17-year-old students at Conestoga High School held down a 14-year-old boy on Oct. 15 and penetrated him with the broom handle while he screamed, Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan said.

And it gets even worse…

“No Gay Thursdays” was a tradition started by the football team at least three or four years ago, in which behavior the team normally considered to be “gay” was considered “not gay” on Thursdays, Hogan said.

Older players would come up behind younger players and put their genitals atop the younger players’ heads, among other sexually explicit or suggestive acts, the prosecutor said.

You can read the rest here. 

Eli Apple, Falcon’s Coach, Gay Questions

When a coach with the Atlanta Falcons asked Eli Apple if he was gay, the coach learned a few things about asking that question during an interview.

 “The Falcons coach, one of the coaches, was like, ‘So do you like men?'” Apple told Comcast SportsNet. “It was like the first thing he asked me. It was weird. I was just like, ‘No.’ He was like, ‘If you’re going to come to Atlanta, sometimes that’s how it is around here. You’re going to have to get used to it.’

The Falcons have apologized to Apple, and the NFL is looking into the matter. You can read the rest here.  

While I’m not a believer in anyone asking personal questions about sexuality, because it has nothing to do with job performance, I’m also not that sure I like the underlying implications associated with this article. In other words, there’s nothing wrong with being gay…or at least there shouldn’t be anything wrong with being gay.  This is a tricky one.

Ellen Page, Gaycation, and Hitman

I like Ellen Page and I think this might be interesting to a degree, but this is one huge reason why I love gay romance and m/m romance so much. I don’t care if  straight women or gay men write the romances, at least they’re real, they have stories, and they have happy endings for a change. They make us feel better. Unlike this typical Hollywood project, which sounds like another highly contrived story line about a guy who hates gays so much he wants them killed.

Really?

A gleefully free and gender fluid cross-dressing party in Japan gives way to an intimate scene in which a young Japanese man comes out to his mother, asking Page and Daniel to be in the room so his mother would think he has friends. The Carnivale bacchanal in Brazil is in stark contrast with a face-off Page has with a homophobic politician—and a police officer who has killed gay people and sometimes works as a contract killer.

You can read more about this here. 

Page goes on to make a dramatic statement about why she does these things and how hard she’s suffered, and I feel like getting out my violin. I’m pretty sick and tired of the whole police officer villain thing, too. Ellen Page should only know how many gay cops I’ve known.