Sex

It was billed as a "shocking tell-all" and a "world exclusive," but the National Enquirer's March 26 cover story landed with a thud. TMZ, Page Six and other major players in celebrity gossip ignored the article in which a masseur claimed John Travolta offered money for sex. FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this article used the term "masseuse"; it should have said "masseur. " Five weeks after the issue left the checkout aisle, a DUI attorney from Pasadena put the anonymous masseur's tawdry tale in a lawsuit and it became an overnight pop culture sensation, topping Google News, trending on Twitter and meriting a segment on "Good Morning America.

WASHINGTON -- Almost two weeks after President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, polls provide some measure of the impact - zero. Gallup's tracking poll average for May 1-7 - the period that ended with Vice President Joe Biden's statement that he supported same-sex marriage -- showed Mitt Romney ahead of Obama by three points - 47%-44%. And the tracking poll average over the past seven days? Romney ahead of Obama by three points - 47%-44%. In between, neither candidate's standing in the poll changed in any significant way . (Some Democrats believe Gallup's poll underestimates the size of the minority vote, but whatever may be the poll's flaws, they wouldn't change the before and after comparison.)

Manny Hamelburg, 68, a retired businessman, had fought prostate cancer for years. First, he tried radiation, then a drug with side effects that nearly killed him, and finally Lupron, a drug that blocks production of testosterone, the hormone that can fuel prostate cancer. The cancer disappeared. But life was miserable. Without normal levels of testosterone, Hamelburg says, he had no energy, and "zero libido for seven years. I was like a eunuch. I was chemically castrated. Sex was just hugs."

Warning: Music may be hazardous to your health. It's not just your hearing that's at risk, according to a study out Monday in the June issue of the journal Pediatrics. Teens and young adults who listen to digital music players with ear buds are almost twice as likely as non-listeners to smoke pot, the study says. And those who attend concerts or frequent dance clubs are nearly six times as likely as homebodies to go on a binge-drinking bender. These findings are based on survey results collected from 944 low-income students at two vocational schools in the Netherlands.

washington -- Mitt Romney twice emphasized his unique business background when he and eight other Republican presidential candidates faced off in a debate last week in Iowa. "I've spent the last, as I've told you, 25 years in the private sector," former Massachusetts Gov. Romney declared at one point. "I understand why jobs come and why jobs go. I've done business in 20 countries."

Birds do it, bees do it, even wildebeests and zebus do it. And during the "Valentine's Day Sex Tour" at Santa Ana Zoo today, visitors will learn exactly how animals court and mate in a captive setting. Wild stuff? Well, the event is for adults only, but zoo curator Connie Sweet said she wouldn't go so far as to slap an R-rating on the tour. Call it PG-13.

"Oh, you mean the guy with the 70-year-old head and the 20-year-old body-builder body? That picture has got to be Photoshopped." Dr. Jeffry Life smiles when I tell him about the general reaction I get about the famous picture of him with his shirt off, the shot that turned a mild-mannered doctor in his mid-60s into a poster boy for super-fit aging and controversial hormone replacement Appearing in medical-clinic ads in airline magazines and...

CINCINNATI - The Rev. Chris Beard is a theological conservative, make no mistake about it. He believes the Bible is the word of God. He believes the Holy Spirit speaks to him directly. He believes, as an article of faith, that abortion and same-sex marriage are wrong. Still, when a group of religious leaders in Ohio held two days of meetings in Cincinnati recently to talk about economic and racial justice, issues usually associated with the political left, there was Beard, a fourth-generation Pentecostal preacher with a disarming smile, a shaved head and a set of convictions that knock holes in the stereotypes about white evangelical Protestants.

On summer nights in the mid-1960s, while black-and-white television crackled elsewhere in his Staten Island home with news of Southern violence and Vietnam, Bobby Lasnik would stretch out in his bedroom to let the righteous soundtrack of the civil rights movement waft into his impressionable teenage soul. Tuned in to WBAI-FM, coming across the water from Manhattan, he heard baleful laments about injustice that he would carry with him for a lifetime. "Suddenly there was someone speaking a certain kind of truth to you. You'd say, 'Wow!

A new study showing an estimated 7% of American teens and adults carry the human papillomavirus in their mouths may help health experts finally understand why rates of mouth and throat cancer have been climbing for nearly 25 years. The evidence makes it clear that oral sex practices play a key role in transmission. The new data, published online Thursday by the Journal of the American Medical Assn., are the first to assess the prevalence of oral HPV infection in the U.S. population.

In the summer of 1966, Newsday columnist Mike McGrady threw down the gauntlet to a trusted coterie of fellow journalists: Produce a novel so poorly written and relentlessly focused on sex that it would fly off bookstore shelves. Two dozen colleagues, including past and future Pulitzer Prize winners, accepted the challenge. Hoping to rival Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins, the reigning masters of the steamy potboiler, McGrady and his collaborators hid behind the pseudonym Penelope Ashe and in 1969 published "Naked Came the Stranger," about a housewife who seeks revenge on her cheating husband by bedding as many men as possible.

Reacting to Eric J. Segall's Op-Ed article on Tuesday warning of a gay rights backlash if theU.S. Supreme Court overturns Proposition 8, reader Sara Wan of Malibu wrote: "It is wrong to suggest that pushing for civil liberties should be left to Congress and not include the judicial system. As long as discrimination is legal, it is harder to fight it. "Segall's analogy to past laws banning interracial marriage is incorrect. While there was not a specific push to legalize interracial marriage, the 1967 Supreme Court decision was the direct result of the civil rights movement.

WASHINGTON - Wading into the gay marriage debate, the Republican-led House tacked a provision banning same-sex marriages at military chapels onto a sweeping defense bill that is now headed to the Senate. Despite the high-octane public discussion over gay marriage that has intensified since President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriages, the issue has been one that Capitol Hill has largely sought to avoid. But the GOP majority led Congress into the issue by adding the same-sex marriage prohibitions to the defense bill.

Vice President Joe Biden said he and President Obama are "in the same place" on same-sex marriage, just more than a week after his comments on the issue forced the president to hasten his public declaration of support. In an interview with CBS affiliate WTRF during a stop in southeast Ohio on Thursday, Biden reiterated Obama's position that it would be up to each state to "determine for themselves how they're going to treat the issue of marriage. " At the same time, he said everyone is "entitled to the same exact rights.

SAN ANSELMO, Calif. — Days after President Obama announced his support for same-sex marriage, the Presbyterian Church's Northern California governing body refused to rebuke a retired minister for marrying gays and lesbians when it was legal in California. The Presbytery of the Redwoods, which governs churches from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, voted 74 to 18 Tuesday to reject the church's official denunciation and instead support the Rev. Jane Adams Spahr, who had been found guilty by an ecclesiastical court of violating the Presbyterian Constitution and her ordination vows for marrying 16 same-sex couples.

Julie Berebitsky's history of hanky-panky in U.S. offices over the last 150 years is an extraordinary achievement. To write about so much bottom-pinching, ogling and scandal without a single double entendre or levity of any sort must have taken considerable restraint. Instead, the history professor at the University of the South in Sewannee, Tenn., has chosen to present her treasure trove of saucy examples in such a relentlessly flat way that "Sex and the Office: A History of Gender, Power and Desire" is an effort to get through.

San Onofre State Park has its renowned surfing beaches, a nuclear power plant and bluff-top camping along old U.S. 101. And then there's Trail 6. Swimsuits are optional at Trail 6, at the southern tip of the park. That in itself has never been a problem. But now the popular, secluded strip of sand at the foot of the trail is experiencing rocky times that threaten its tranquillity and perhaps its future, park officials warn. The problem is that people are having sex there.

In ABC's new thriller "Missing," a former CIA agent whose child has been kidnapped springs out of retirement with guns, martial-arts skills and primal parental passion blazing. If that sounds familiar, well, it was also the plot of the 2008 film "Taken," which had Liam Neeson tearing through Paris to extricate his daughter from the clutches of a sex-trafficking ring. In "Missing," the gender roles are reversed. When Michael (Nick Eversman), a student studying abroad in Rome, goes missing, his mother, Becca Winstone (Ashley Judd)

Washington Bureau WASHINGTON - In 1988, well-heeled gay activists went to Michael Dukakis' presidential campaign with an offer to raise $1 million for his election effort. The campaign said no, according to the activists. "They turned us down flat because it was gay money," said longtime gay rights advocate David Mixner. Less than a quarter-century later, the gay and lesbian community ranks as one of the most important parts of President Obama's campaign-finance operation.

Re "Obama takes a stand for gay marriage," May 10 Iwas 13 when I first considered the same-sex marriage "dilemma. " I was a Catholic school student, yet even then I could not find the moral (let alone legal) reason by which two consenting adults should not be allowed to marry. Each religion can define the issue's spiritual validity. However, morally and legally, marriage is a common right. Three years ago, I married a wonderful Mexican American man. As recently as 1967, laws that prohibited interracial marriages such as ours were still constitutionally legal in the United States.