Homosexuals

David Paul Hammer was a prisoner at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester a few years ago when he bragged to a reporter for an alternative magazine that he had received at least $176,000 from 1,500 to 2,000 people he had duped into sending him money. "The trick is making them fall in love with you through letters and on the phone," Hammer told the Los Angeles-based magazine, the Advocate.

BEIJING - Orgies and anal sex hardly seem the usual fodder of traditional Chinese folk art, but that is exactly what one Chinese artist is depicting in a series of provocative paper-cuts that are now being exhibited in Los Angeles for the first time. Paper-cuts originated in Eastern Han Dynasty China (AD 25-220) and are hung on windows or doors for good luck. But instead of the usual decorative flowers and birds, Xiyadie, whose pseudonym means "Siberian Butterfly," portrays graphic and daring depictions of homosexual love - long considered taboo in China.

Organizers of the annual Rainbow Festival were prepared for trouble. The Q Crew, a local "queer/straight alliance," distributed cards telling people what to do if approached by hostile demonstrators. Sympathetic local church groups formed a protective buffer along the festival ground's cyclone fence. Mounted police were on patrol. Jerry Sloan manned a table for Stand Up for Sacramento, a recently formed gay self-defense organization. "So far, so good," he said. "No Russians."

Mitt Romney apologized Thursday after a newspaper story described bullying behavior on his part when he was an 18-year-old senior at an elite, all-boys prep school in Michigan. The Washington Post detailed a 1965 incident at Cranbrook School in which a buttoned-down Romney apparently was incensed by the dyed blond locks of a junior known for his "nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. " He led a "posse" of students in a charge against the boy, the Post reported. "He can't look like that," Romney reportedly told a close friend at the time.

Not too long ago, Rena Puebla and Ellie Genuardi had a hard time getting distributors to carry their unique cake toppers -- porcelain-like figurines that interchange to make gay, straight and interracial couples. When they pitched the figurines to home shopping networks, executives shot them down. Ditto mainstream stores. No one told them expressly why they wouldn't carry the decorations, but to the business partners who designed the diverse dolls, the message was clear.

First Lady Barbara Bush offered a strong defense of private lives, including her own, saying Wednesday that she sympathizes with Wellesley College students who raised questions about her speaking at their graduation, but she thinks they don't understand "where I am coming from." "That's all right," Mrs. Bush said. "I chose to live the life I've lived, and I think it has been a fabulously exciting, interesting, involved life. I hope some of them will choose the same. . . .

CBS golf commentator Ben Wright, who escaped unscathed in May after denying he made disparaging comments about lesbians in women's golf hurting the sport, is in hot water again. This week, in a Sports Illustrated Golf Plus article entitled "Living With a Lie," two sources say Wright did make the statements he claimed he didn't say. Also in the article, Wright makes inaccurate statements about the reporter he says misquoted him.

The Delhi High Court issued a landmark ruling Thursday decriminalizing homosexuality, a move that could bring more freedom to millions of people in this deeply conservative nation. The ruling said that treating relations between consenting adult homosexuals as a crime is a violation of basic human rights safeguarded under the Indian Constitution. The court decision amending an 1860s-era British Empire statute ostensibly applies only to Delhi.

Citing concerns about remarks he made in an earlier hearing, an Orange County judge removed himself Monday from a case involving televangelist Paul Crouch. Judge John M. Watson made the decision during a contempt-of-court hearing for Enoch Lonnie Ford, a former TBN employee who says he had a homosexual tryst with televangelist Paul Crouch. Crouch, 70, founded the world's largest religious broadcasting network and is a popular on-air personality. He has vehemently denied the accusations.

With only a few days left before gays can marry in California, nine major gay rights groups asked couples Tuesday not to sue the federal government or other states to have their California nuptials recognized, saying that legal action could harm the marriage equality movement.

Girl Scouts are dangerous -- and not just to your diet. At least that's what Indiana lawmaker Bob Morris says. He has labeled the Girls Scouts of America a radical organization that promotes homosexuality and abortion and is out to destroy American values. The Republican state representative is being roundly ridiculed for his position, even within his own party. But Morris isn't backing down. "My family and I took a view and we're sticking by it," Morris told the Associated Press this week, adding that his daughters are now members of a group for conservative Christian girls.

The Miseducation of Cameron Post A novel Emily M. Danforth Balzer & Bray: 480 pp.: $17.99, for readers age 14 and up There's something about the open spaces of the Great Plains that make the exploration of nascent homosexuality even more alienating and risky than the same experience in a big city or suburb. At least that's the story detailed in Emily Danforth's young adult debut, "The Miseducation of Cameron Post," a book that reads like a literary response to the Katy Perry hit "I Kissed a Girl" if it took place under a big Montana sky. Cameron Post is just 12 when she kisses her best girl friend on a dare - ostensibly as practice for future liaisons with boys.

Amid the photographs of beauty contestants competing in Miss California USA this weekend are those of two young women who are making history. Jenelle Hutcherson, 26, of Long Beach and Mollie Thomas, 19, of West Hollywood are the first openly gay contestants in the 60-year history of the state pageant, whose winner will go on to compete in Miss USA, the national pageant. "That Miss California crown would sure look nice atop the 'hawk," Hutcherson said, referring to her Mohawk hairstyle.

In February 1970, a top aide to President Nixon warned J. Edgar Hoover that a new reporter in town, Jack Nelson, was said to be gunning for the FBI. Hoover took the advice to heart. "Keep an eye on these characters," the FBI director wrote his subordinates, referring to Nelson and two of his editors at the Los Angeles Times. "They are up to no good. " As reports on Nelson's activities poured in from FBI field offices, Hoover would scribble comments across the bottom. The more he read, the more vitriolic he became.

Ventura County prosecutors, trying for a second time to convict a former middle school student of fatally shooting a gay classmate, will drop the key allegation that the crime was motivated by a hatred of homosexuals. The announcement came Tuesday as several jurors from the original trial, which ended last month in a hung jury, expressed strong misgivings about the prosecution's case. They said they didn't believe Brandon McInerney killed Larry King because the boy was gay and urged that he be tried in Juvenile Court instead of as an adult.

Fred Karger, Republican candidate for president, knows there is no chance he will be the GOP nominee, much less the next leader of the free world. "I'm not delusional," he says, though one might wonder what, exactly, he is thinking. Karger is no political naif. He spent nearly 30 years as a campaign advisor to several of California's top Republicans and served as an election strategist for corporate clients, including cigarette maker Philip Morris. His trophies — a home a block from the ocean in Laguna Beach, a second one above Laurel Canyon and a silver Mercedes to ride between the two — speak to his success.

Like so many other multi-tasking Californians, James Joseph Lizotte bides his time in line at the bank by chatting on his cell phone. What makes Lizotte unusual, FBI officials alleged Tuesday, is that he robs the bank once he gets to the front of the line. Sometimes, authorities said, Lizotte hits up more than one teller at once, slamming his gun on the counter to show he means business.

Officials with the Orange County High School for the Arts have forbidden a student from exhibiting at a senior class art show an original painting that depicts two nude women embracing. The student, Letitia Houston, 18, said the painting and a text that accompanies it are meant to address her lesbianism. School officials said Thursday that they are not "censoring" the art but are disqualifying it because it does not fit Houston's submitted theme: her struggle with Catholicism.

Reporting from Paris -- Rudolf Brazda, one of the last known survivors of Nazi Germany's persecution of gays who later called his three years in a concentration camp a descent into hell, has died. He was 98. A German gay rights group said Brazda died Wednesday, but it did not provide details. Brazda was among thousands of gay men deported to the death camps during World War II because of their sexual orientation. Adolf Hitler's Nazis saw homosexuals as an aberration and a threat to the Aryan race.

Jonathan Turley is probably not the most popular man right now with supporters of same-sex marriage. The George Washington University law professor has filed a suit challenging the constitutionality of Utah's anti-polygamy laws — and his argument is based on a landmark 2003 Supreme Court gay rights decision. That's not good news in the view of most gay rights supporters, who don't want their cause linked to that of polygamists any more than they want to see parallels drawn with people who engage in incest, bestiality and other taboo sexual practices.