Active-Duty Gay and Lesbian Soldiers Discuss Marching in Uniform at San Diego Pride: VIDEO

CNN iReporter Chris Morrow speaks with active-duty soldiers marching in San Diego's LGBT Pride parade about what it meant to march in uniform over the weekend.

Check out the inspiring interviews, AFTER THE JUMP...

(via think progress)

David Geffen Never Owned a Cell Phone, Never Wed Keanu Reeves

He offers a rare interview at the Television Critics Association semiannual press tour as press for an upcoming American Masters documentary titled Inventing David Geffen.

The Hollywood Reporter has a report:

Geffen, who is on tape suggesting "ego" isn't a "pejorative" term in his mind, insists he never saw himself as the smartest person in the room at any point during his career, revealing that he did poorly in school -- “I thought I was dumb,” he said -- and was fired from a number of early jobs coming out of high school. In fact, he said the only reason he had the confidence to go after a gig as a William Morris agent is because he believed it rewarded a different skill set, and one that he had: the ability to “bullshit on the phone.” Decades later, he’s enjoying his time away from the business – at 69, he said, he doesn’t “want a job” -- and noted that he’s content spending weeks at a time lost in books and newspapers. (Other Geffen facts: He’s never carried a cell phone, has never texted anyone and doesn’t own an ATM card.)

At THR, Geffen also discusses the movie and music industries, the newspaper business, DreamWorks, and "untrue" rumors:

If you’ve heard the one about Carly Simon suggesting her song “You’re So Vain” is about Geffen, he assures you it wasn’t. “Not that I’m not vain; I’m just not her vain,” he shrugged, adding that the one about him marrying Keanu Reeves – an actor he said he had never met at the time of the report -- was similarly untrue.

Documentary About Bigotry Faced by Gay Man After Boyfriend's Death Breaks Kickstarter Fundraising Record: VIDEO

Back in May I posted a devastating video.

Shane Bitney Crone marked the one-year anniversary of his boyfriend of six years, Tom Bridegroom, with a video called "It could happen to you", chronicling what happened to him after Tom's sudden death.

I've posted it again, AFTER THE JUMP...

After the video went viral, a producing team led by Linda Bloodworth Thomason sought funds on Kickstarter for a documentary about Tom's story.

“The prejudice and bigotry that Shane and Tom experienced was not unlike what I witnessed in 1986 when my mother died of transfused AIDS," said Bloodworth Thomason.

Now, GLAAD reports that fundraising for Bridegroom, An American Love Story, has broken all of Kickstarter's records:

The fundraising website, which has helped to finance more than 7,400 films, confirmed that the indie documentary about marriage equality surpassed all previous fundraising efforts by netting $384,375 in four weeks.

Scientists Create Artificial Jellyfish from Rat Cells: VIDEO

Scientists have built a synthetic jellyfish from silicone and cells from a rat's heart:

The synthetic creature, dubbed a medusoid, looks like a flower with eight petals. When placed in an electric field, it pulses and swims exactly like its living counterpart.

“Morphologically, we’ve built a jellyfish. Functionally, we’ve built a jellyfish. Genetically, this thing is a rat,” says Kit Parker, a biophysicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who led the work. The project is described today in Nature Biotechnology1.

Parker’s lab works on creating artificial models of human heart tissues for regenerating organs and testing drugs, and the team built the medusoid as a way of understanding the “fundamental laws of muscular pumps”.

The hope is to create something similar from human heart cells to test drugs that would improve cardio functions.

Watch it move, AFTER THE JUMP...

Gay New York Rapper Le1f Straddles a Sexy Pikachu in 'Wut': VIDEO

NYC rapper Le1f's new video for "Wut" is making a splash.

FADER profiles him in their upcoming issue:

Understandably for an artist with mainstream hopes who still embraces subversivity, Le1f is tentative about his music being framed by his gayness. “I understand that it makes people take notice,” he says. “Before I rapped explicitly about dick, they could still tell I was gay but they called my music campy instead. Now that I’m rapping about sleeping with dudes, I’m always a gay rapper. I prefer that, because there’s nothing campy about what I do. It’s all real.” He says he wrote political songs about gay rights, but left them off of the album. “I am gay, and I’m proud to be called a gay rapper, but it’s not gay rap. That’s not a genre. My goal is always to make songs that a gay dude or a straight dude can listen to and just think, This dude has swag. I get guys the way straight rappers get girls. I’m not preachy. The best thing a song can be called is good.”

Watch "Wut" and download his new album, AFTER THE JUMP...

Dark York:

Massive Hotel Implodes in New Orleans: VIDEO

For those of you who enjoy a good controlled building implosion, here's the destruction of New Orleans' Grand Palace Hotel at South Claiborne Avenue and Canal Street which took place Sunday morning to make way for a new teaching hospital. The collapse sent a cloud of dust billowing toward these spectators.

"The new hospital will replace Charity Hospital, which provided medical care for poor residents and was not reopened after Hurricane Katrina," according to the Times-Picayune.

Watch, AFTER THE JUMP...