Megan Fox's Lesbian Kiss: Artistic Or Gratuitous?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/16/megan-foxs-lesbian-kiss-a_n_289286.html

Megan Fox's Lesbian Kiss: Artistic Or Gratuitous?
09-16-09

Megan Fox may feel safer kissing girls, but Amanda Seyfried, her onscreen make out partner in 'Jennifer's Body,' assures us their sapphic scene is just a gimmick.

"We knew that it was going to play a really big role in publicizing the movie," Seyfried told WENN. "We kind of rolled our eyes at the idea of having to make out."

Not so!, said the film's screenwriter, 'Juno' scribe Diablo Cody. "If the two protagonists of the film were a guy and a girl and in a particularly tense moment, they shared a kiss, no one would say it was gratuitous. But the fact that they're women means it's some kind of stunt. It was intended to be something profound and meaningful," she told The Frisky.

Lesbian kiss at Seattle ballpark

What guy would mind seeing this girl kissing?

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D9142SUG1&show_article=1

Lesbian kiss at Seattle ballpark stirs up gay-friendly town
By MANUEL VALDES
Associated Press Writer

SEATTLE (AP) - Most of the time, a kiss is just a kiss in the stands at Seattle Mariners games. The crowd hardly even pays attention when fans smooch.

But then last week, a lesbian complained that an usher at Safeco Field asked her to stop kissing her date because it was making another fan uncomfortable.

The incident has exploded on local TV, on talk radio and in the blogosphere and has touched off a debate over public displays of affection in generally gay-friendly Seattle.

"Certain individuals have not yet caught up. Those people see a gay or lesbian couple and they stare or say something," said Josh Friedes of Equal Rights Washington. "This is one of the challenges of being gay. Everyday things can become sources of trauma."

As the Mariners played the Boston Red Sox on May 26, Sirbrina Guerrero and her date were approached in the third inning by an usher who told them their kissing was inappropriate, Guerrero said.

The usher, Guerrero said, told them he had received a complaint from a woman nearby who said that there were kids in the crowd of nearly 36,000 and that parents would have to explain why two women were kissing.

"I was really just shocked," Guerrero said. "Seattle is so gay- friendly. There was a couple like seven rows ahead making out. We were just showing affection."

On Thursday, after an internal investigation, the Mariners said in a news release that their seating staff had acted appropriately, and the couple was approached because of their behavior—which included "making out" and "groping" in the stands—and not their sexual orientation.

"We have a strict nondiscrimination policy at the Seattle Mariners and at Safeco Field, and when we do enforce the code of conduct it is based on behavior, not on the identity of those involved," Mariners spokeswoman Rebecca Hale said earlier this week.

In the release, the Mariners said the women were told they could continue to kiss, but that they had to "tone it down."

"The women refused to modify their behavior, began swearing at the seating hosts and complained that they were being singled out for their sexual orientation," the club said.

The code of conduct—announced before each game—specifically mentions public displays of affection that are "not appropriate in a public, family setting." Hale said those standards are based on what a "reasonable person" would find inappropriate.

Guerrero denied she and her date were groping each other, saying that along with eating garlic fries, they were giving each other brief kisses.

On Tuesday, Guerrero said a Mariners director of guest services had apologized to her. The team spokeswoman could not immediately confirm that.

After the story broke, the Mariners were blasted by the sex-advice columnist Dan Savage, who wrote about the incident on the blog of the Stranger, an alternative weekly paper.

"They go out of their way to say it's a quote-unquote family setting," Savage said. "As a gay season-ticket holder, we've never been quite sure what that means exactly. I constantly see people see making out. My son has noticed and asked, `Do they show the ballgame on women's foreheads?'"

Savage called for a "kiss-in" to protest against the Mariners.

Web sites have been swamped with blog postings for and against Guerrero and her date. And the story has people talking in Seattle.

"I would be uncomfortable" seeing public displays of affection between lesbians or gay men, said Jim Ridneour, a 54-year-old taxi driver. "I don't think it's right seeing women kissing in public. If I had my family there, I'd have to explain what's going on."

"It all depends on the degree," Mark Ackerman said as he waited for a hot dog outside Safeco Field before Wednesday's game. "Even for heterosexual couples."

Since the incident, Guerrero's job and her past have come under scrutiny. She works at a bar known for scantily clad women and was a contestant on the MTV reality show "A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila," in which women and men compete for the affection of a bisexual Internet celebrity.

"People are saying it's 15 more minutes for my career," Guerrero said of the ballpark furor, "but this is not making me look very good."

In 2007, an Oregon transit agency chief apologized after a lesbian teenager was kicked off a bus when a passenger complained about her kissing another girl.

Also in 2007, a gay rights group protested a Kansas City, Mo., restaurant they said ejected four women because two of them kissed, and a Texas state trooper was placed on probation in 2004 for telling two gay men who were kissing at the state Capitol that homosexual conduct was illegal in Texas.

"There's a double standard. That's the bottom line," said Pat Griffin, director of the It Takes a Team! Education Campaign, an initiative from the Women's Sports Foundation to eliminate homophobia in sports.
___
On the Net:

Seattle Mariners: http://seattle.mariners.mlb.com

Equal Rights Washington: http://www.equalrightswashington.org

Gay rumours eclipse Condi’s glory moment

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2983771.ece

December 2, 2007
Gay rumours eclipse Condi’s glory moment
Tony Allen-Mills, New York

IT SHOULD have been Condoleezza Rice’s finest hour as US secretary of state: at last President George W Bush was hosting a Middle East peace conference that she had been struggling to organise for months.

Yet when Rice’s photograph appeared on the front page of America’s bestselling weekly newspaper last week, it had nothing to do with her peacemaking efforts. She had been dragged into a National Enquirer article headlined “Who’s Gay and Who’s Not”.

The article revived long-standing Washington gossip about Rice’s sexuality and sparked off the usual flurry of internet chatter about her high-profile role in a Republican administration widely regarded as hostile to gays.

It also underlined the increasing friction in American politics between a high-minded media establishment disdainful of bedroom gossip and the no-holds-barred, consumer-driven world of instant internet scandal. A Google search of the words “Condoleezza” and “lesbian” last week yielded 146,000 hits.

Rice was not alone in falling victim to what the US media elite invariably decries as corrupted journalistic standards but what the rest of America seems to regard as the real story in Washington: who is sleeping with whom?

While most leading US newspapers were preoccupied with serious policy issues such as Iraq and illegal immigration, New York tabloids were feasting on startling new details about Rudolph Giuliani, the city’s former mayor, who is alleged to have concealed the cost of the security protection he needed while on secret trysts with his then mistress.

Giuliani dismissed the allegations as a “political hit job” and “dirty trick” that just happened to pop up hours before a key televised debate between Republican presidential candidates. Although it appeared that Giuliani had done nothing illegal, the fuss refocused attention on his colourful private life and may damage his appeal to conservative voters.

Political insiders also noted that the detailed allegations, including documented evidence of the accounts used to hide Giuliani’s potentially embarrassing expenses, were published not by a newspaper but by Politico.com, an increasingly influential website.

The mainstream US media also managed to ignore one of the most read political stories on the internet last week, an account in The Times about a dirty-tricks campaign in South Carolina, including anonymous allegations that Senator Hillary Clinton is having an affair with Huma Abedin, a female member of her campaign staff. Democrat officials dismissed the allegations as an obvious attempt to smear the frontrunning presidential candidate.

The former senator John Edwards, Clinton’s Democratic rival, felt the tabloid lash when the Enquirer claimed he too was having an affair with a campaign aide while his cancer-stricken wife campaigned on his behalf elsewhere. Edwards denounced the story as “false, completely untrue, ridiculous” and said the Enquirer had failed to produce evidence “because it’s made up”.

The steady flow of salacious and often thinly sourced sex-related stories is causing headaches for US newspaper editors, who have been bludgeoned by shrinking circulations and internet competition yet are still clinging to values described by one blogger last week as “snoozy, prissy and haughty”.

The drift towards internet-fuelled sensationalism was deemed to be so serious earlier this year that the Columbia Journalism Review, a bastion of US media elitism, convened a panel of top editors to consider whether the government should step in to subsidise serious newspapers as a valuable public service, along the lines of the BBC.

The Enquirer described its article as “the ultimate guessing game among Hollywood fans - trying to figure out which big-name stars are gay”. The report went on: “According to the buzz among political insiders, it’s an open secret that . . . Rice is gay.”

The piece quoted an unnamed “in-the-know” blogger as saying that during her years as provost of Stanford University in California, Rice was “completely out as a lesbian and it was not a scandal, just a reality”. The paper referred to reports that in 1998 Rice bought a house with a “special friend”, another unmarried woman, a film-maker named Randy Bean.

It was far from the first time that she had been linked to lesbian rumours. In a recent biography of Rice, Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s diplomatic correspondent, noted that Bean, described as a “liberal progressive”, was her “closest female friend”. It was Kessler who discovered from a search of property records that Rice and Bean owned a house together.

Rice does not comment on her private life, and she is not an elected official, so her sexuality has never been a campaign issue. But the gay community has long been troubled by her association with conservative Republicans opposed to gay marriage, and with evangelical Christians who regard homosexuality as a sin.

At one point last year Rice was regarded as a possible Republican candidate in the 2008 White House race. Yet most commentators agreed that she was reluctant to run, and a Washington Post columnist concluded that she was “the longest of long shots”, as it indeed turned out.

The columnist Chris Cillizza made no mention of Rice’s sexuality, and it took an internet reader named Anne Roifes to remind the Post that high journalistic standards sometimes miss the point.

“It is widely believed in gay circles that Condi is a lesbian,” Roifes commented. “That could be one reason she will not run.”