Headline Of The Day

The Daily Beast today published a lengthy accounting of the The Gathering, a secretive meeting of anti-gay right wing activists that starts in Orlando today. An excerpt:

The Gathering is an annual event at which many of the wealthiest conservative to hard-right evangelical philanthropists in America—representatives of the families DeVos, Coors, Prince, Green, Maclellan, Ahmanson, Friess, plus top leaders of the National Christian Foundation—meet with evangelical innovators with fresh ideas on how to evangelize the globe. The Gathering promotes “family values” agenda: opposition to gay rights and reproductive rights, for example, and also a global vision that involves the eventual eradication of all competing belief systems that might compete with The Gathering’s hard-right version of Christianity. Last year, for example, The Gathering 2013 brought together key funders, litigants, and plaintiffs of the Hobby Lobby case, including three generations of the Green family. The evangelical right financial dynasties and foundations that meet each year at The Gathering dispense upwards of $1 billion a year in grants. But even that is overshadowed by the bigger sums that The Family and The Gathering have managed to route from the federal and state government to fund their movement via the Faith-Based Initiative program, USAID, PEPFAR and other multibillion-dollar programs.

Many of the anti-gay hate groups involved will be familiar to you. Definitely hit that link.

Daily Beast Retracts Claim That Jason Collins "Didn't Come Clean" About His Engagement To A Woman

The Daily Beast has retracted a column that claimed Jason Collins "didn't come clean" about having been engaged to a woman in the essay Collins penned for Sports Illustrated.  The Daily Beast post has been widely trumpeted on anti-gay and right wing sites.  From the retraction notice:

In that piece, Collins wrote, “When I was younger I dated women. I even got engaged. I thought I had to live a certain way. I thought I needed to marry a woman and raise kids with her. I kept telling myself the sky was red, but I always knew it was blue." In his original blog post, [Howard] Kurtz incorrectly stated that Collins “didn’t come clean” about the engagement. In an amended version, Kurtz added that Collins “downplayed” the engagement and “didn’t dwell on it.” The Daily Beast sincerely regrets Kurtz’s error—and any implication that Collins attempted to hide or obscure the engagement.

UPDATE: Kurtz has "parted company" with Daily Beast.

Breitbart: Andrew Sullivan Was Fired

Breitbart writer John Nolte today claims that according to a mysterious unnamed source, Andrew Sullivan was actually fired by the Daily Beast. Two weeks ago Sullivan announced the end of his relationship with the site and launched a (so far) successful subscription model. Nolte writes:

According to this source, who spoke exclusively with Breitbart News, the powers that be at the Daily Beast decided the traffic Sullivan's Daily Dish delivered just wasn't worth the price of holding on to him for another year. In other words, the Daily Beast did not renew Andrew Sullivan's contract, and he was let go. Though Sullivan never came out and said directly that it was his choice to leave the Beast, the carefully worded January 2 post announcing the move most certainly left the impression that the reason for the separation didn’t involve him being dumped. Rather, that this was all about Sullivan and his editorial staff making a scary/brave decision to embark on a new adventure involving a completely independent, subscription-based blog.

Nolte offers the following as "proof" of Sullivan's unpopularity.

For a blogger with a media profile as big as Sullivan's, the fact that he has fewer than 75,000 Twitter followers is a bit surprising. By comparison, Ben Smith has over 125,000, Dave Weigel over 98,000, and Michelle Malkin (who Sullivan has named an unflattering award after) has more than the three of them combined. Furthermore, a quick scan of the Daily Dish front page, which holds around 40 individual posts, reveals that (as of this writing Friday afternoon) only one post has received more than a hundred Facebooks "Likes," and 24 have fewer than ten. These days, connecting with social media is absolutely crucial to clicks and readership. If those Facebook numbers are the norm, the Dish is severely lacking in all-important social media traction.

As I noted in the comments in the above-linked post, judging the popularity of a blogger merely by Facebook likes on individual posts is really lame.  A quick check of Sitemeter reveals that Andrew Sullivan's sub-site on Daily Beast received just over 120 million pageviews in 2012.  Not only that, Sullivan's one-man-show (with staff) out-performs ALL of Breitbart and its many, many contributors.  

Newsweek Goes Digital-Only

Not very surprising. From Tina Brown:

We are announcing this morning an important development at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Newsweek will transition to an all-digital format in early 2013. As part of this transition, the last print edition in the United States will be our Dec. 31 issue. Meanwhile, Newsweek will expand its rapidly growing tablet and online presence, as well as its successful global partnerships and events business. Newsweek Global, as the all-digital publication will be named, will be a single, worldwide edition targeted for a highly mobile, opinion-leading audience who want to learn about world events in a sophisticated context. Newsweek Global will be supported by paid subscription and will be available through e-readers for both tablet and the Web, with select content available on The Daily Beast.

This Week's Newsweek Cover

Ed Shultz On Crazy Eyes & Homophobia

With special guests activist Mike Rogers and Daily Beast columnist Michele Goldberg.

HomoQuotable - Andrew Sullivan

"The chance to be part of a whole new experiment in online and print journalism, in the Daily Beast and Newsweek adventure, is just too fascinating and exciting a challenge to pass up. And to work with media legends, Barry Diller and Tina Brown, and with the extraordinary businessmen Sidney Harman and Stephen Colvin, is the opportunity of a lifetime." - Andrew Sullivan, announcing that his blog is leaving its four-year home at The Atlantic.

Best-Selling Books By Politicians

Dubya's memoir launches today and The Daily Beast has ranked the best-selling books by politicians in the last ten years. Dubya's publisher is shipping 1.5M copies for the initial run, but of course no one knows if those will actually sell through.

Christine O'Donnell Has A Long Sordid History Of Demonizing LGBT People

Wade Richards, a former member of Christine O'Donnell's "ex-gay" group who has since come to terms with his sexuality, tells all in a report published today by the Daily Beast. According to Richards, O'Donnell has a lesbian sister, whom he credits with helping him accept himself. The article lists some of O'Donnell's track record in her long campaign to demonize LGBT people.

Toward the end of the Clinton administration, she protested the appointment of James Hormel to be ambassador to Luxembourg, a posting the religious right opposed because Hormel was gay. “The SALT was concerned about Hormel’s ties to the pedophile-rights movement,” her website said, though there was not a shred of evidence behind the slur. In 1997, in a clip recently unearthed by Talking Points Memo, she appeared on C-SPAN, where, looking fresh, lovely, and innocent, she objected to AIDS sufferers being called “victims” because the disease is the product of their own actions. In an appearance on Fox in 2000, she exclaimed over the horrors of New York’s gay pride parade: “They’re getting away with nudity! They’re getting away with lasciviousness! They’re getting away with perversion!”

After working with O'Donnell's group, Richards went to work for Peter LaBarbera, going undercover at International Mister Leather.

Richards was unnerved when he went into Americans for Truth About Homosexuality’s “media room” and found copious hard-core porn—for research, naturally—as well as leather bondage gear for undercover work. “The sad thing was, there’s that 80-year-old grandma in Wichita, Kansas, thinking she’s donating this money to a good cause, and it’s going to who knows what kind of ‘research,’” says Richards. “As someone struggling with same-sex attraction, I thought, this is really not a place I need to be hanging out in.”

Richards eventually became an ex-ex-gay after reaching out to Wayne Besen at Truth Wins Out. Read the entire story at the Daily Beast.

50 Most Stressful Colleges

The Daily Beast has ranked the 50 most stressful colleges using a weighted system examining tuition costs, campus crimes, acceptance rates and other factors. Stanford tops the list.

1. Stanford
2. Columbia
3. MIT
4. University of Pennsylvania
5. Harvard
6. Princeton
7. Vanderbilt
8. Carnegie Mellon
9. California Institute of Technology
10. Northwestern

Hit the link for the rest of the list, which includes much of the University of California system and bottoms out with the University of Florida at #50. The University of Central Florida, my massive alma mater, didn't make the list. UCF has the third-highest enrollment in the country, but has the rep of being relatively laid back.

The Daily Beast On Grindr

According to a Daily Beast article on Grindr, the iPhone's where-is-the-closest-fuckable-guy app, its creator is rather coy about its intended use.

For a product that's been on the market for under a year, the number of urban legends surrounding Grindr is impressive. "Did you hear about that lawyer who was at his desk and found someone two feet away who turned out to be his assistant so they screwed in his office?" Or, "That's nothing compared to the dad accidentally Grinding with his son downstairs." Which is perhaps why the folks behind Grindr distance themselves as much as possible from what its users actually do with it. "I don't like to say we're a dating service, because we are really just a technology provider with user generated content." says Joel, who says Grindr has been adding about 2,000 new users a day since it launched in March 2009. "We don't get involved in how it's used."

Bulletin boards. AOL M4M. Manhunt. Craigslist. Grindr. What will be next?

JMG Makes Advocate's Top Political Blogs

This here website thingy made the Advocate's Top Political Blogs list.

From Joe.My.God to The Daily Beast, Advocate.com spotlights a few of the best blogs that cover politics, inside and way outside the Beltway.

Joe.My.God: The name sounds salacious, but the content is anything but. Not to say Joe Jervis's six-year-old blog is boring -- it just gets to the point when it comes to gay politics and news. Reporting from New York, Jervis also has his ear to Washington. He seamlessly blends big-picture posts (on the White House, GLAAD, "don't ask, don't tell" protests) with more local stories, covering gay bashings that often go unreported.

Here's the complete list in the order of the story.

The Bilerico Project
Gay Patriot
Immigration Equality Blog
BlogActive
David Mixner
Politico
Joe.My.God.
HRC Backstory
Chris Crain
Daily Beast
Drudge Report
Andrew Sullivan
FiveThirtyEight
Gay Politics/Victory Fund

I think I'd have rather been on their Top 15 Gay(ish) Blogs list, but whatevs, go me,

Daily Beast Reports: HRC Told Congress To Wait On DADT, Push For ENDA, Hate Crimes Instead

In a video posted at The Daily Beast, reporter Jason Bellini claims that Sen. Chuck Schumer "let it slip" that the Human Rights Campaign told "Senators and members of the U.S. House" to put aside the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and instead focus on ENDA and the hate crimes act.

UPDATE: Michael Cole, Senior Communications Manager of the HRC, wrote me with this statement: "This story is not only an outright lie, it is recklessly irresponsible. HRC never made such a deal and continues to work with congress and the administration on a full range of equality issues including a swift end to the military's shameful ban on gay servicemembers."

UPDATE II: Jason Bellini wrote to direct us to this post from Michelangelo Signorile.

While Bellini had unnamed sources, I, however, have a named source saying exactly what Bellini reports, someone I interviewed several weeks ago on the show: Aaron Belkin of the Palm Center, the research institute that focuses on the military and sexuality, located at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Belkin writes often for The Huffington Post and interacts with members of Congress. (I have including a few-minute clip from that interview here as well). I didn't see or know about the Bellini piece when I interviewed Joe (it either had just posted or wasn't up yet), but I did ask him about what Belkin claimed. Belkin was relatively certain in what he told me:

AB: "...Our major national gay rights organizations -- it would be one thing to say nothing, but there is pro-active lobbying on the hill for Congress not to consider [the "don't ask, don't tell"] issue. And so the community has been appalling on this issue.
MS: Have you seen any response from any of those groups, and I guess we're talking about the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, other Washington groups?
AB:...We've heard from so many offices that not only are they not doing anything but they're pro-actively lobbying against consideration of the issue. I feel very confident in saying that.

Read Signorile's entire piece on this flap, it's very enlightening.