Just One Look...#99

Forty Children To Join In Gay Pride Parade

AMSTERDAM - Forty children will take part in Saturday's Gay Pride boat parade through the Amsterdam canals. They are all under the age of 16.
It is the first time a boat especially for children will be included in the annual parade. Danny Hoekzema, a 14-year-old boy, thought up the idea for the children's boat together with gay rights organisation COC.
Hoekzema's announcement of the plan this spring caused considerable commotion. A ban seemed imminent, but Amsterdam Mayor Job Cohen and Emancipation Minister Ronald Plasterk gave permission after COC agreed that the children would be accompanied by their parents. The children would also not be dressed as scantily as many of those taking part on 'regular' boats.
COC announced yesterday that 40 "homosexual children" would be taking part. "They will be encouraged by dozens of youngsters who are not venturesome enough to join in from the boat. About sixteen parents will be on board, wearing T-shirts with the text 'Proud Parent'."
COC's intention is "to show the entire country that there are young homosexuals who are completely normal boys and girls." For COC chairman Frank van Dalen, there is no doubt that children can know that they are homosexual or lesbian. The question is "why there are young people who sometimes know this as young as eleven, but who are denied the right to be happy and to shape their own identity."
from NIS News

Gay Couple Comming To Wisteria Lane

Desperate Housewives fans are getting their spoilers worth already online as the series gears up and tries to snap out of its funk with new and what one would hope would be improved storylines. The first one comes from OK! Magazine. The spoiler - is - don't keep reading if you don't want to know - newlywed Susan Mayer, played by Teri Hatcher, is pregnant!
"The pregnancy is revealed in the very first new-season episode," a show insider tells OK. "Teri was thrilled with the idea when she first learned about it in early July. Her story line is going to be huge."
And Susan has some new neighbors. Creator Marc Cherry announced at the ABC press tour, "We're going to have the first male desperate housewives. They will move into the old Applewhite house and one of the gay men will just have a fractious, hateful relationship with Teri Hatcher.
What originality! A pregnancy and a gay couple. All that is missing is to bring someone back from the dead for the tifecta.
Back to a knocked up Susan Meyer: OK! reveals that Wisteria Lane's hottest single mother and her on-off boyfriend, Mike Delfino, played by James Denton, married in the season finale last May. The story picks up just one month later when the ABC series resumes Sept. 23.
Teri may be delighted by the story line, but not so happy, OK has discovered, are the show's costumers, who consider fake pregnancies a styling nightmare. "The wardrobe people are actually hoping that Teri decides to get pregnant in real life," says the insider. "It would make their lives a lot easer!" In real life, twice-divorced Teri, 42, has a 9 year-old daughter, Emerson Rose, and has found love with director Stephen Kay.
from The National Ledger

Tonsils May Help Transmit HIV During Oral Sex

The tonsils might serve as a passageway through which HIV enters the body, suggests an analysis of cells from the mouth and throat.
Researchers stress that the risk of acquiring HIV through oral sex is far too low to warrant preventive tonsillectomies. But they say the finding might have implications for preventing transmission of the virus from HIV-infected mothers to their children through breastfeeding.
Niki Moutsopoulos at the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research in Bethesda, Maryland, US, and her colleagues examined gum tissues taken from dental patients to make room for dental crowns, and tonsils taken from eight individuals as part of a treatment for sleep apnoea, a breathing disorder. "They were pretty much going to throw them out if I didn't use them for my research," Moutsopoulos says of the tissue samples.
With the help of specially designed antibody molecules, the team was able to determine the level of various proteins within these tissues.
About 12% of the tonsil cells tested positive for the protein CD4, which sits on the surface of immune cells that are particularly vulnerable to infection by the virus. By comparison, less than 4% of the gum cells contained this protein.
Moutsopolous and her teammates also conducted a genetic analysis of the tissue samples, using special probes that bind to specific DNA sequences. This experiment revealed that the CXCR4 gene was 11 times more active in the tonsils than in the gum samples. The gene codes for a protein, also called CXCR4, that also helps HIV infect immune cells.
Condoms protect
The scientists found further evidence that the tonsils are perhaps more susceptible to HIV infection that other oral areas, including the cheek lining and floor of the mouth.
The new findings provide biological data to complement clinical and epidemiological evidence suggesting that HIV can – in exceptional cases – spread through oral sex, according to John Greenspan, director of the AIDS Research Institute at the University of California in San Francisco, US. "It's a further piece of the jigsaw puzzle," he told New Scientist.
But he and others note that while HIV transmission can occur through oral sex, it appears to happen very rarely. Experts have estimated that at most 4 out of every 10,000 oral sex exposures result in infection, compared with 1 out of every 200 to 1000 episodes of genital contact.
For this reason, researchers suggest people should use condoms to protect themselves from acquiring HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases through oral sex. Undergoing a tonsillectomy to remove the tonsils would be too drastic a measure based on current evidence, they add. "I think that would be a stretch," says Moutsopoulos. "We can't go taking out every tissue that HIV could pass through."
Probiotic treatments
She adds, though, that if future studies bear out a link between tonsils and HIV transmission, there could be implications for blocking the spread of the virus from mother to child in parts of the world where infant formula and antiretroviral drugs are in short supply. Scientists have estimated that a child has a 15% chance of acquiring the virus through breastfeeding within the first year of life.
Greenspan notes that some scientists have started investigating whether probiotic treatments – which promote the growth of healthful bacteria – might reduce the transmission of HIV to very young children through the oral cavity and gastrointestinal tract.
Moutsopoulos stresses that the tonsils – which were removed routinely up until the late twentieth century – are now seen as a first line of defence in the immune system, alerting the body to potentially dangerous foreign particles. For this reason, she does not believe there is enough evidence to warrant their removal as part of a prophylactic measure against HIV transmission.
from New Scientist

Gay Porn On Conan O'Brian

Here's an interesting twist on the new public acceptance of porn. We here at CyberBears, LLC were recently made aware that an establishing scene from one of our copyrighted adult DVD titles was used this past week on the Conan O'Brien show. We had not been
informed of this use, or asked for permission to use the clip, so we investigated further.
It appears that, during an interview broadcast on the July 18, 2007 episode of Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Adam Sandler introduced a clip of two men sharing an apple as a scene from his new movie. It was actually a clip of two of our performers, Joe Falconi and Ali, from a copyrighted adult video titled “Feed the Bears,” directed by Ken Slater, and released in 2006 by CyberBears, LLC.
All of our DVD's clearly indicate that they are only licensed and sold for in-home viewing by consenting adults. The notion of broadcasting a portion of one of our adult movies over open network television violates the spirit of the legal and ethical guidelines our company follows to shield our content from inappropriate viewers.
Of course, we are also concerned about protecting our copyrighted materials. We were surprised that neither the performers, the director,nor the company were credited.
We do understand very well the legal notion of fair use as it applies to copyrighted material used for reporting, satire, and public interest media. We believe that NBC's inappropriate use of clearly labeled adult content in violation of the stated terms, their misrepresentation of the content presented, and their failure to credit the actual source, all exceeded their rights.
from Cyber Bears

Gay Teen PSA

And another PSA.
This one is a Norwegian public service announcement for gay teens.
GaribaldiGay

Ron JeremyTells Kids Not To Watch Porn

Industry veteran Ron Jeremy is featured in a new commercial intended to keep children away from pornography. Jeremy plays himself in the minute-long public service announcement for Christian group XXXChurch, telling his sidekick "Pete the Porno Puppet" to stay away from porn.
"Pornography is for consenting adults... not for kids," Jeremy says. "We don't want kids to see our videos."
"We do a public service announcement with me and a puppet saying, 'Don't watch porn 'til you're over 18 years of age. It's for adults only, and it's rated XXX'," Jeremy told AVN. "I say, 'We don't b.s., we don't use record labeling, we don't sneak sex through advertising, we tell you exactly what it is from the very beginning. We're the most honest industry-- you should appreciate us, rather than giving us a hard time.'"
"Pete" was conceptualized in 2003 by XXXChurch.com founder Craig Gross and adult director James "Jimmy D" DiGiorgio, who created the educational spots for cable television.
Gross and Jeremy have toured college campuses, debating the issues that surround pornography.
"We're going on a bus tour starting in August," said Jeremy. "We'll be hitting a bunch of cities by bus; they're shooting it for probably HBO, and we did a wrestling thing where me and Craig Gross, we go into a ring and we flip each other on the ground, we stamp on each other, the religious boy vs. the porn star. It's very funny, we're getting a lot of mileage out of it. It's on YouTube like crazy."
"Through our debates, Ron and I have struck up a sort of friendship," said Gross. "It freaks people out, but even though we have many differences, we have found one thing we agree on, and we're working together on it."
On the subject of Gross, Jeremy told AVN, "He's actually a great guy; he doesn't agree with my profession, and I don't happen to agree with some of his. He's never beaten me in a debate. We've faced 5,000 kids at some of the colleges in America -- he cannot beat me. I hope he reads this. Craig Gross, you cannot beat me in a debate. At best, we'll tie, but you can't beat me. He admits it! On his own website, XXXChurch, he admits that he never beat me in a debate."
"He feels that the business is bad for people, 'cause our girls are not treated fairly, it's a bad thing, it's bad for those who watch it," Jeremy continued. "But he's also against all forms of masturbation. I slam him so bad on that point, that we don't even bring it up, 'cause I don't want an easy victory. 'Cause we're debating in front of college kids -- you tell a college kid that masturbating's not good, he's gonna lose the debate before it starts. I want it to be more fair and square. He tries to avoid asking me that famous question, 'So what if your daughter wanted to do it?' That's the Achilles heel for me. Thank god the people I debate -- I've always said this, it's so funny -- thank god Craig Gross; Susan Cole, a feminist, a graduate of Harvard; and Michael Leahy [of] an organization called Bravehearts for recovering sex addicts; thank god these guys have never seen or heard of Donkey Punch or Pink Eye, or I'd be so screwed. I can defend anal, I would even defend a bukkake. I'll defend double anal. Defending blowing myself, that's a tough one, but I'll be damned if I could defend Donkey Punch or Pink Eye. Who the fuck in porn is alright to shoot that stuff, either, you know?"
"I don't mind what Craig does," Jeremy concluded. "That's why it's an interesting debate. If can get girls in porn who don't want to be in the business, and they want to get out, they want to find a spiritual path, then let him go for it! I have no problem with what he does for a living. There's some girls who do not belong in porn. If Craig Gross weeds them out, and gets them to do other things, then more power to him. If a girl feels bad about what she's doing, McDonald's is better. When he tries to go for those who are perfectly happy and content, and making a ton of money, I think he's wrong. So he has his place, I think, in the industry. He still can't beat me in a debate. Not even close."
XXX Church plans an additional series of PSAs in which Jeremy and "Pete" discuss porn films, set to debut online in August.
from AVN