An IPad is a great way to keep up with everything current. It makes reading the news, checking your Facebook and reading the literary greats a breeze. It is also a great way to stay culturally aware. There is such a growing gay community that it is easy to get lost in the world of blogs, news stories and advice columns and while there are some really great writers out that that the gay community can relate to, such as Dan Savage and Dave Sedaris, there are several ‘classics’ that should definitely not be missed either. An IPad makes reading these greats easy and accessible. Below you will find a list of the 10 classic books that every lesbian should download on their IPad.
1. Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
This 1973 novel really broke ground in the gay and lesbian world. It tells of a lesbian love story and incorporates humor and an “everydyke” quality. It was one of the first novels of its kind to blatantly address lesbianism.
2. Fingersmith by Sarah Walters
This 1980 novel has so many plot twist in this historical fiction you won’t be able to put it down. It has been compared to the writing styles of Charles Dickens only with erotic lesbian sex scenes and a sweat shop pumping out pornographic texts.
3. Patience and Sarah by Isabel Miller
This novel written in 1969 is a historical novel and explores issues like a young women’s first foray into lesbian sex, cross dressing and leaving home to find herself.
4. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by Fannie Flagg
If you have ever seen the more you probably would have no idea about the lesbian relationship between the 2 main characters of the movie. Reading it, you have no choice but to notice with all the seduction, love making and food fights.
5. Crybaby Butch by Judith Frank
This is a newer novel written 2004 and tells the story of 2 parallel lives of butch women that have crossed each other’s path. The story is beautifully written and the characters are strong and compelling.
6. Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
This story is a little more traditional and is an autobiographical novel. It was the breakout book of its genre and revealed the secretes of the butch culture before it became socially acceptable.
7. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
This 1981 novel depicts the Biblical analogies and accuses religion, convservative culture and has a way of leaving writers baffled from reading this semi-autobiographical novel.
8. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
This 1982 novel has been required reading for many high schools. It is not directly about lesbianism but rather suggested sexual sparks between Shug and Celie. Walker’s writing style is engaging and thought provoking and after reading this book it is easy to see why it has been so well loved by people of all sexualities and generations.
9. Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
Dorothy Allison is a lesbian writer who has created a memorable character in Bone. The book tells the good, bad and ugly of the deep South and the choices that are made in order to be who they are and also save themselves.
10. Crocodile Soup by Julia Darling
This is a modern novel set in England where Darling gives us a look into the life of Gert, who after mending a broken heart is ready for love again. It has a dark sense of humor and has a cast of oddballs that make it so enjoyable and intriguing.

It looks like a typical or shall we say stereo typical gay Sunday brunch outside with two guys lounging by the pool grubbing on Doritos brand chips. Lets not forget that the chips are not your typical Doritos they are gay Salsa Verde in a pink fabulous bowl and Margarita’s with straws of course. The gay guys in this commercial with their legs crossed and cut off jean short shorts look like they are in a George Michael ‘Faith’ video from the early 90s. I am just not sure if i know any gay guys that wear jean short shorts I would see it better with them wearing Andrew Christian or Aussie Bums. And where are the Prada or Gucci sunglasses? Really two gays in the backyard and no designer sunglasses?

As for the peeping Tom or George whatever his name is in the flannel I assume he is the in the closet gardening husband at least according to the mmm hmm remark made by that gorgeous man crunching on Doritos. The wifey comes out there while he is pruning and starring into the big pink Doritos bowl fantasizing about them being in his mouth so he can get his wet lips around them. Although in those shots it shows the tanned legs of the guy in the backyard while he is grabbing for the chips.

This may be a little too gay for the Superbowl Demographic. I am sure this will cause a stir if it is aired like the Doritos commercial that was going to air that involved a Catholic priest. Judging from the things I have heard going on in Dallas this year at the Superbowl it could be the gayest Superbowl yet.

There are many legal and political issues that the LGBT community faces in the United States that need to be continually addressed. Lambda legal is dedicated to these issues, and have been for quite some time now. They are the largest and oldest such organization in the United States and have helped the LGBT community make great strides politically and legally in the past few decades alone. Most notably of late is the Gays in the Military issue that has been at the forefront of the gay rights movement. Acceptance of homosexuality has always been an uphill battle, and Lambda Legal as well as the HRC work hard to to make it easier.

One of the longest running issues that the LGBT community has faced has been workplace discrimination. While there is a federal law in place that businesses cannot discriminate against people in their hiring process based on a persons sexual orientation, there are no laws in roughly half the states that bans workplace discrimination based on a persons sexual orientation. There needs to be an even, across the board, representation of sexual discrimination laws that cover every aspect of a persons employment. From the hiring process, to the actual time of employment, and to the time of an actual discharge of said employment. Currently there is no across-the-board, uniform policy, and we are working hard to change that.

Laws regarding family, relationships, and marriage have been a high priority of ours for going on 40 years now, with the specific issue of marriage leading the way. We have been fighting hard to protect families since the 1970′s when a lesbian mother,who was a foster mother, regained custody of her children with the help of Lambda Legal when the appropriate state agency took them away. In the same time frame we helped a father who was gay get the legal right to visit his children after a legal divorce. Same sex relationships and marriages without children have also gotten our attention and help through the years in regards to obtaining the same health benefits that heterosexual couples get. There are many different legal rights that we try to obtain for same sex partners and we have learned through the years that you have to start small if you want to get to the top of that legal hill.

The youth of our country is also a big concern for us. Bullying in general in our public schools has been on the rise lately, but with gay students this is labeled as harassment for it is based on a persons sexual orientation. Being a teenager these days is hard enough, but being a gay teenager in this society is extremely difficult, and the pressure they can feel from their peers is not only felt in school, but in out-of -home care facilities as well. We have made a lot of legal strides with the public schools in our country to make them a more safe and open environment for gay students. Out-of -home care facilities such as foster homes and juvenile detention centers are also hotbeds for sexual discrimination, and we keep active in those areas as well.

Our legal teams and political activists have been working overtime for decades now to help ensure equal rights for everyone in the LGBT community. With your financial help we will be able to do even more. Organizations such as the HRC also help make life in general for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans-gender individuals better on a legal and political level. For example the HRC helped in the State Departments decision to modify the application process for a child to obtain a passport. The information on the parents now ask for “father or parent 2” or “mother or parent 1″, instead of simply “father” or “mother”. We believe that the mere acknowledgment of the different family structures here in the U.S. will lead to the acceptance of them.

With your donations to help with our legal and political work, we can all help ensure a more fair and balanced way of life for us all.

The former CEO of IAC recently resigned so that the Match.com CEO could take over the business and get things moving more aggressively but before all of this happened Barry has been having some fun with the boys. You have to hand it to Mr. Diller that being on top of the world is not just being the boss man at Match, Ask.com, Excite, Vimeo, ServiceMagic, The Daily Beast, CitySerach, Reference.com, and College Humor. He likes to hang with the hottest of the A-list and have some fun with the boys. Move over Hugh Hefner we have Barry Diller.

From what we see here it seems that Gawker was out to get Barry Diller. They may have went a little too far in their TMZ or Perez Hilton type reporting. Then again someone has to go after the CEO’s and they did not get too dirty but they did go a little far putting up all the pics and stalking his Facebook account. I mean can a person have a Facebook account these days and get some privacy? The poor guy only had 50 or so friends he could trust to befriend on Facebook and he must have had a media snake in there somewhere because they sure knew what he was up to.

Barry Diller was photographed with many hot boys including some blond twins during Thanksgiving. Now he is known for spending money but he makes a lot of money as one of the top CEO’s although his companies and websites are not growing as they should for the amount he is being paid. Wait back to the Thanksgiving Weekend.. isn’t the White Party Weekend? Why were they not in Miami? Oh they had their own private area to play in the yacht!

Bryan Fox one hottie and Arturo Diaz the club promoter who he hung out with. It seems he has great taste in boys but needs to do some upgrades on some of his websites. The reporters involved in the Gawker uncovering were Ryan Tate and Brian Moylan.

It seems there has to be something done here with all these states and countries taking action against what they perceive as people having unprotected sex or having sex at all. Some of these laws come down to hate and discrimination against gays or those with HIV. It should be pretty plain and simple if you have sex with someone and you do not use protection then its your fault as well. You can’t go blaming someone for not knowing their status or what STD they might have.

If you have had multiple sex partners then how can you go around blaming all of them or even blaming one person. We always want to blame someone for things we have done but this is something that is preventable if you take the proper steps. The choice to bareback comes with consequences for some and others just get lucky but when two people are having consensual sex then the questions or tests should be done before the sex not after.

States having HIV lists which I am sure are online somewhere or they probably will have iPhone apps with these telling you when someone with HIV walks in the door. We have gone so big brother these days even with things like HIV. It is offensive that there is an HIV list. Just because someone has HIV they do not deserve to be on some list with a scarlet letter on them. They have not committed a crime for having a virus and the person who gave it to them unless they did not consent did not either.

Of course this is a very touchy subject if someone gets an STD they are quick to blame someone. I cant imagine anyone who would want to purposely give someone an STD or HIV. It is crazy to me to think someone should be put on some public list like some type of criminal. The laws in this country and even the ones where the Wiki Founder was arrested are out of control aimed at HIV and Sex. Sex has always been such a subject the media likes to blow out of proportion as you see here this article at the Body tells it best. HIV is being turned into a crime. Not the rapist or the pedophile or the real criminal but it is the HIV which with laws like we are seeing are turning carrying HIV into a crime. With HIV being a crime this could hurt prevention and testing efforts as you can see here:

Most of the cases prosecuted around the world have not actually focused on criminal HIV transmission, but rather on exposure to the risk of transmission. These cases often hinged on whether or not someone with HIV had informed their sexual partner — sometimes a one-night stand, sometimes a long-term partner or spouse — that they were HIV-positive before having sex that may — but may not — have risked HIV transmission.

Very few cases have involved people who truly intended to harm anyone. That’s the ‘line in the sand’ that most experts, including UNAIDS, have agreed fulfill the criteria of when it is justified to prosecute allegations of criminal HIV transmission. Rather, what most of these cases boil down to is perceived responsibility for HIV prevention. Research suggests that most HIV transmission takes place during sex between two consenting adults, neither of whom is aware that one them is living with HIV.

Have such laws and prosecutions reduced the number of new infections? There is absolutely no evidence that they have. Have they made more people with HIV disclose? There’s no evidence there, either. However, there is some evidence that HIV-specific criminal laws and prosecutions for non-disclosure have made people who are at risk of HIV, and who expect to be told if their sexual partner is HIV-positive, feel more secure, even though this is a false sense of security. And there’s little doubt that these laws and prosecutions have further increased the stigma associated with HIV, sometimes making people living with HIV feel even more insecure about disclosing — the very thing expected of us.

-The Body’s Edwin Bernard

We have scored you a discount code for La Cage Aux Folles, Winner of the 2010 Tony Award for Best Musical Revival. This offer is good for tickets as low as $47 and is valid for performances through April 3rd, which means it can be used now, to see Kelsey Grammer & Douglas Hodge through February 13th, or it can be used to see Jeffrey Tambor & Harvey Fierstein in the months that follow.

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They recently took a video of the door girl hoping to interest you in La Cage.

I bet we can all think of a soccer player or two who we would like to be gay. But how many ‘out’ gay soccer players are there and who are they? The important word there is ‘out.’ If you take the generally agreed statistic of ‘one in ten’ people being gay, then there should be at least one gay payer per team, and at least two gay players in any one match at any time. And then when you count the number of teams in even one country, say Great Britain, you should be looking at enough gay players to fuel every locker room fantasy you’ve ever had.

But, we come back to that word again; who many are actually ‘out’ and how many are just being given the gossip treatment? The first ‘non-out but possibly gay ‘cos we’d like him to be at the moment’ soccer player must be Cristiano Ronaldo. I tracked down some info on him which may or may not be true when asking the question ‘is Cristiano Ronaldo gay?’ on a few Q & A sites. The answer? Well, the closest I got to what might be true was someone saying that when they lived next door to him, when he was younger, it was known in the village that he was bi-sexual but preferred women to men, whatever that means.

All the other sites I saw on this subject were, more or less, simply trying to fulfill our fantasy, that CR is gay and would one day appear on our doorstep and want to leap into bed with us. Some were funny, there were edited interviews, snap-shots of him just happening to look at another guy and so on, but the answer, sadly, probably is that no, he is not.

So enough of who we’d like to be but who isn’t a gay soccer player? Who is actually out? As far as I can tell, none of them!

According to Zimbio.com, Xisco is ‘England’s first gay soccer player.’ Which is actually not true. Justin Fashanu came out while playing professional football, found life tough in the sport as a gay man, finding that ‘footballers are very narrow-minded people’ as he put it in an interview, and killed himself in May 1998. This act did a little raise the awareness of homosexuality in football, but it’s still not the done thing to be out. So maybe Xisco is one of the first to come out in recent years, he’s certainly not the only gay player. “Francisco Jiménez Tejada Xisco has become the first openly gay soccer player in England’s Premier League. Xisco isn’t completely out, but his secret has now been revealed. The 22-year-old Spanish striker currently plays for Newcastle United.” zimbio.com

Ah, but there is a catch here. Apparently Xisco is only out because photos of him kissing other guys have appeared on the net. One online commentator said, ‘Francisco Jiménez Tejada, the Spanish soccer player known to fans as Xisco, has become the first openly gay soccer player in England’s Premier League. Whether he likes it or not.’ (querty.com)

So, that’s two soccer players who may or may not be gay. Why is it so hard to discover these facts? Well, as Fashanu implied, it’s a pretty narrow-minded game. And, when you look at soccer fans (and players) you can see where he was coming from. Those thousands of men who line the terraces every Saturday, acting all macho and threatening, yelling and cheering on their teams, they don’t mind if guys hug and kiss on the pitch, but if they suspected they did that in a bedroom, well, that’s the end of that player’s career.

All a bit hypocritical if you ask me, especially if we take the one in ten rule again and divide 30,000 fans on the terraces by ten. That’s 3,000 gay fans every Saturday in one stadium alone. Watching at least two gay players, while condemning gay men…

Bottom line; there are, there must be, gay soccer players out there, but it is not a sport and environment where it is safe or advisable to come out.