NEWS: Medicine, Mansions, Music (VIDEO)

Walking in LA? You'll find America's gayest intersection in West Hollywood, at the intersection of San Vicente and Santa Monica.

Versace's South Beach manse hits the market. Asking price: $125 million.

Known as Casa Casuarina, the 10-bedroom, 11-bathroom house overlooks the ocean. Mr. Versace bought the home and its adjacent lot in 1992 for just under $10 million and then invested another $33 million in the property, adding a 6,100-square-foot south wing, a 54-foot-long mosaic-tiled pool lined with 24-karat gold, a mosaic-covered courtyard and frescoes on the home's walls and ceilings. He was killed outside the home in July 1997. Peter Loftin, a telecom entrepreneur, purchased the property in 2000 for $20 million. After using it as a residence for several years, Mr. Loftin turned the home into a boutique hotel with a restaurant and opened it in late 2009 as the Villa by Barton G.

Yesterday I posted this awesome country-song-cum-It-Gets-Better video. Here's a making-of vid, in which the principals explain why the world needed a countrified It Gets Better video in the first place. 

MP Dr. Liam Fox, babbling British bigot, explains that only a "metrpolitan elite" cares about marriage equality:

“This is a contentious issue but I have to say that I am much more in favour of social mobility than social engineering.

“I think that the vast majority of the public have a completely different set of priorities from what I would call the metropolitan elite and I think they will be looking for economic and social issues to be dealt with first.”

His comments come as a major Conservative donor, Michael Farmer, reportedly joined the campaign against same-sex marriage.

Is Mayor Bloomberg hip to evolutionary biology?

Religious Minnesotans divided on marriage equality:

Members of Minnesota’s clergy are increasingly taking sides on the push for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, a political battle that’s pitting certain denominations against others and, in some cases, splitting believers from the same faith.

This Sunday, a group of Catholic churchgoers opposed to the amendment are kicking off the “Catholics Vote NO!” campaign, flying in the face of the church’s local hierarchy, which supports the measure.

It’s just the latest in a lengthy list of recent organizing efforts by the faithful — from a recent “pastor’s summit” of church leaders who support a ban to a gathering this past week of more than 100 Christian and Jewish ministers opposed to it.

A peaceful Pride Parade in Croatia.

Might gay-inclusiveness be hurting J.C. Penney's bottom line?

"Mr. Johnson is alienating Penney's traditional customers in a bid to attract new customers from higher socio-economic segments that now shop Macy's, Nordstrom and Target," wrote Al Lewis of Dow Jones Newswires, which appears in the Wall Street Journal. "The result? Larger-than-expected losses, plunging revenues, dwindling customer traffic and a plunging stock price."

A further step towards an HIV vaccine.

Quick -- could someone old enough to remember the disco era please tell me if Armi & Danny ever made it out of Finland? (Don't know Armi & Danny? Well then -- prepare to witness the best, or maybe the worst, or possibly the only Finnish sci-fi disco ever committed to Betamax, AFTER THE JUMP ... )

NYC Mayor Bloomberg Blasts NC's Vote Banning Gay Marriage in UNC Chapel Hill Commencement Speech: VIDEO

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg addressed the passage of Amendment One head on in his commencement speech at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill yesterday.

Said Bloomberg: “Each and every generation has removed some barrier to full participation in the American dream. That work is not over. Far from it...And, I would argue, last week's referendum banning same-sex marriage shows just how much more work needs to be done to ensure freedom and equality for all people....I have no doubt, that in your lifetime, liberty’s light will allow us to see more clearly the truth of our nation’s founding principles, and allow us to see all people and all couples as full and equal members of the American family.”

Watch, AFTER THE JUMP...

NEWS: Andrew Sullivan, Audra McDonald, And Clay Aiken Vs. Tony Perkins Vs. Rand Paul (VIDEO)

The aforementioned Andrew Sullivan story is out now, and it really is rather like that Toni Morrison essay:

... The core gay experience throughout history has been displacement, a sense of belonging and yet not belonging. Gays are born mostly into heterosexual families and discover as they grow up that, for some reason, they will never be able to have a marriage like their parents’ or their siblings’. They know this before they can tell anyone else, even their parents. This sense of subtle alienation—of loving your own family while feeling excluded from it—is something all gay children learn. They sense something inchoate, a separateness from their peers, a subtle estrangement from their families, the first sharp pangs of shame. And then, at some point, they find out what it all means. In the past, they often would retreat and withdraw, holding a secret they couldn’t even share with their parents—living as an insider outsider.

And this, in a different way, is Obama’s life story as well. He was a black kid brought up by white grandparents and a white single mother in Hawaii and Indonesia, where his color really made no difference. He discovered his otherness when reading an old issue of Life magazine, which had a feature on African-Americans who had undergone an irreversible bleaching treatment to make them look white—because they believed being white was the only way to be happy. He wrote:

I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page ... I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show [others] what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before.

Barack Obama had to come out of a different closet. He had to discover his black identity and then reconcile it with his white family, just as gays discover their homosexual identity and then have to reconcile it with their heterosexual family. The America he grew up in had no space for a boy like him: black yet enveloped by loving whiteness, estranged from a father he longed for (another common gay experience), hurtling between being a Barry and a Barack, needing an American racial identity as he grew older but chafing also against it and over-embracing it at times ...

GOProud wroth with Romney for pandering to "big government theocrats." (They plan to vote for him anyway.)

A very cool experiment with slime mold.

What's Audra McDonald up to?

Why is The Avengers making so much damned money?

Mayor Bloomberg delivers commencement address at University of North Carolina; blasts Amendment One.

Daily Mail: Colombian drug apparently turns people into mindless zombies. (Story neglects to mention that the same claim has been made of weed, LSD, ecstasy, PCP ...)

Gawker didn't get Rand Paul's joke either.

The Family Research Council's Tony Perkins might or mightn't have got it; either way, he thinks Paul should be nicer.

Face The Nation: Clay Aiken vs. Tony Perkins, AFTER THE JUMP ...

Bloomberg's 'Cruel' Budget Throwns 160 Homeless Kids Out of Shelter Beds Says LGBT Shelter Executive Director

NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s newly released budget cuts $7 million to the city’s Runaway and Homeless Youth Services, and plan to eliminate 160 youth shelter beds,.

Carl Siciliano, executive director of the Ali Forney Center, NYC's largest LGBT homeless youth shelter, released a statement this morning:

“Mayor Bloomberg's plan to throw 160 homeless children out of their shelter beds and into the streets is cruel, reckless and contemptible. These cuts create an even bigger crisis for the LGBT teens who are thrown out of their homes and forced to endure homelessness on the streets of our city. The LGBT community needs and demands political leaders who will protect our children. Instead, Mayor Bloomberg has proposed eliminating more than half of their shelter beds. The Ali Forney Center, and all those who work with and care about LGBT homeless youth, will not be silent in the face of this decision, which offends us as a community and needlessly puts our young people in harm's way.”

According to the Center:

Today’s cuts come in spite of the fact that the need for youth shelter beds continues to grow; in 2011 alone, the waiting list for AFC’s 77 shelter beds grew to 199 youths - an increase of 40 percent over the prior year.  In total, the city only funds 250 shelter beds, for a population of 4,000 homeless youth.   In response to this crisis, the Ali Forney Center and a number of allied LGBT organizations have launched the Campaign for Youth Shelter.  This initiative calls on New York City and State to back an additional $3 million in annual funding, set aside to create 100 new shelter beds every year.  The Campaign today calls for the city to raise its Runaway and Homeless Youth Services budget from the just-announced $5 million to $13.5 million, both revoking today’s cuts and including the city’s half of the annual $3 million.

NY Pro-Equality GOP Senators to Get $1.25 Million in Gay Money

At the beginning of September I posted about a gay fundraiser for the Republican senators in New York who supported marriage equality. Looks like they're going to make some bank:

This week, the four Republican state senators who provided the decisive votes to pass the marriage bill are to get a big financial boost from those donors, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. A fund-raiser planned for Thursday night in Manhattan is expected to raise about $1.25 million to help finance their re-election bids next year.

The senators have come under heavy criticism from conservatives since they cast their votes in June. A national group that opposes same-sex marriage has purchased billboards in each of their districts, vowing to unseat the lawmakers, and the senators have been eagerly raising money in an effort to defend themselves against possible challengers.

The fundraiser is also being hosted by gay philanthropist Tim Gill, and prominent GOP donor Paul Singer, who is throwing his money behind Romney in the GOP primary.

Bloomberg Chairs Gay Fundraiser for GOP Senators Who Helped Pass Marriage Equality in NY

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, philanthropist and political strategist Tim Gill, and hedge fund manager and marriage equality supporter Paul Singer are chairing a fundraiser on October 13 for Republican New York Senators James Alesi, Mark Grisanti, Roy McDonald, and Stephen Saland, whose votes were instrumental in passing same-sex marriage, at the Union League Club in New York City.

Tickets for the reception run $250 to $16,800.

Check out the invite obtained by Towleroad, AFTER THE JUMP...

The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) this week launched a "You're Fired!" billboard campaign against McDonald and has promised to unseat all the pro-equality lawmakers. The NY Conservative Party has made similar threats.