BREAKTHROUGH Tennessee's State Attorney General Herbert Slatery issued an opinion Feb. 8 in response to a question posed by Rep. Mike Stewart, D-Nashville. “A defendant who targets a person for a crime because that person is transgender has targeted the person because of his or her gender within the meaning” of the current state law that outlines sentence enhancements for hate crimes, Slatery wrote according to Out & About.
This would effectively make Tennessee the first state south of the Mason Dixon line that has protection for trans folk.
MAGIC KINGDOM Prince Harry and his wife Meghan spent Valentine's Day apart, according to DListed, “because duty calls and duty involved him visiting North Norway as Captain General of the Royal Marines Because it was VD and he was away from his wife, the soldiers decorated a little snow house with candles and his wedding pictures. Whatever, this is so staged. It's obvious he wasn't in Norway. He's in some sound stage in London and that little house isn't made of snow, it's made of some kind of fire resistant material. Because real snow would immediately melt after being hit with the rays of heat shooting off of PHG's crotch.”
WILL YOU BE MINE Same sex Japanese couples descended on Tokyo to declare their love and sue for the right to get married.
INVASION Alien shapeshifter Tilda Swinton has a human daughter, and they're promoting The Souvenir at the Berlin Film Festival.
BEHIND THE SCENES Entertainment Weekly looks at the making if The Broken Hearts Club: Inside the making of the 2000 gay rom-com.
“Love, friendship, and heartbreak are universal, no matter a person's sexuality. Greg Berlanti's The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy told the story of six gay best friends — Dennis (Timothy Olyphant), Cole (Dean Cain), Benji (Zach Braff), Patrick (Ben Weber), Taylor (Billy Porter), and Howie (Matt McGrath) — navigating the Los Angeles dating scene. “I had always loved the movie Diner,” says Berlanti (Love, Simon), who wrote and directed Club and is now one of Hollywood's top producer-directors. “I felt like at the time there was no gay Diner. There was no movie that kind of captured the spirit of young gay friendships as I knew them at that particular moment in the late '90s in West Hollywood.” Club grossed only about $1.7 million domestically after its release in October 2000, but has become a beloved cult classic. EW talked to Berlanti and many Club members about going to ‘gay school,' embracing puka shell necklaces, and the film's important legacy.”
TRADING CARDS Cats not included.
PARKLAND A year later.
“Fourteen students died on Feb. 14, 2018, in Parkland, Fla., inspiring marches, new laws and widespread calls to stop the onslaught of gun deaths. But in the year since one of the worst school shootings in the United States, nearly 1,200 more children have lost their lives to guns in this country. The number alone might stop most people in their tracks. But editors at The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that reports on gun violence, wanted to remember the dead not as statistics, but as human beings with rich histories. This week they launched ‘Since Parkland,'a website compiling profiles of every one of the victims. To tell their stories, The Trace turned to those who could relate most closely to the victims: other young people,” said The New York Times.
DRUG TEST‘s can't always detect date rape drugs. Everything about date rape drug tests — from the way they are performed to how the results are interpreted — is deeply unreliable. So why does the legal system treat them like gospel? A BuzzFeed News investigation.
DUNE REBOOT Jason Momoa is the latest star in talks to join the cast of the upcoming reboot of Dune!
The 39-year-old Aquaman star is in negotiations to play Duncan Idaho – the swordsmaster who is fiercely loyal to Timothee Chalamet‘s character Paul Arteides and his family, THR reports. Set in the distant future, Dune follows Paul Atreides, whose family assumes control of the desert planet Arrakis. As the only producer of a highly valuable resource, jurisdiction over Arrakis is contested among competing noble families. After Paul and his family are betrayed, the story explores themes of politics, religion, and man's relationship with nature, as Paul leads a rebellion to restore his family's reign.
THURSDAY Thirsty?
