LoveNDino

...cautiously optimistic

Happy Birthday Mr. Carey. I hope your day was filled with fun and laughter...with men!

@N13 @jjkrkwood @samhexum @OCClient

“Ex-Gay” Mormon Activist Josh Weed Announces Divorce, Apologizes To LGBT Community "I am no different than you." by Brandon Voss They made headlines when they revealed a big family secret: Josh was a gay man. “I am gay, I am Mormon, I am married to a woman,” Josh announced on his blog. “I am happy every single day. My life is filled with joy. I have wonderful sex life. All of these things are true whether your mind allows you to believe them or not.” Believe it or not, earlier this week the Weeds announced their plans to divorce in another lengthy blog post. “Today, we need to let you know that Lolly and I are divorcing,” Josh writes. “Surely, there will be those who are amused or overjoyed.” Josh, a licensed marriage and family therapist, says they have both come to understand that platonic love is not a substitute for mutual romantic love and sexual attraction. “Why am I, as a straight person, entitled to reciprocal, requited romantic love while an LGBTQ individual is not?” Lolly adds. Josh says he ultimately saw divorce as their only option because of his love for the LGBT community, his love for himself as a “beautiful” gay person, and the recent death of his mother, which effectively ended the couple’s sexual intimacy. He explains that they were “suddenly very, very interested in making sure that other LGBT people felt the beauty of their sexual orientation just like we had come to know the beauty of mine. And we were suddenly able to see more clearly the pain that my sexual orientation brought to our marriage.” Josh also uses the divorce announcement as an opportunity to apologize to the LGBT community: We’re sorry for some of the things we said in our original coming out post in 2012. There are several ideas in that post that, though well-meaning, we now realize stemmed from internalized homophobia. We’re sorry, so incredibly sorry, for the ways our post has been used to bully others. We’re sorry to any gay Mormon who even had a moment’s pause as they tried to make the breathtakingly difficult decision that I am now making—to love myself fully for exactly what God made me—because of our post. We’re sorry for any degree that our existence, and the publicity of our supposedly successful marriage made you feel “less than” as you made your own terribly difficult choices. And we’re sorry if our story made it easier for people in your life to reject you and your difficult path as being wrong. If this is you, we want you to know: you were right. You did the correct, brave thing. You are ahead of me in the sense that you have progressed through things I have yet to progress through. You listened to your gut and to God and did a brave, brave thing. Now I’m following your example. We’re sorry to any gay Mormon who received criticism, backlash, or hatred as a result of our story. It wasn’t long after our post that we began to get messages from the LGBTQIA community, letting us know that their loved ones were using our blog post to pressure them to get married to a person of the opposite gender—sometimes even disowning them, saying things like, “if these two can do it, so can you.” Our hearts broke as we learned of the ways our story was used a battering ram by fearful, uninformed parents and loved ones, desperate to get their children to act in the ways they thought were best. One person wrote—and I’ll never get the horror of this out of my head for the rest of my life—saying that he went to see his family for Thanksgiving during his second year of college, where he was an out gay man who openly had a boyfriend. When he got home, his father pulled up our story on the computer and then physically assaulted him, beating him as he had often done during his childhood, saying “if this guy could avoid being a faggot, so could you!” Think of that. If we heard about our story being used in that way, I cannot even imagine the stories, all along the spectrum of manipulative horror, that we have never heard. We’re sorry to anybody who felt a measure of false peace because of our story. There are many people who have good hearts, who were grappling with the issue of homosexuality before we came out, and who were having difficulty reconciling the church they loved with the things they knew about their gay loved ones. Our coming out post gave a false hope: “See? I just knew there had to be a way for gay people to stay true to their faith by denying themselves and live a happy, healthy life!” We’re sorry to perhaps send you back to the state of confusion you were in before you saw our story—but at the same time, that state of confusion is necessary. Something is wrong. It really doesn’t add up. As I have said in thousands of prayers over the last half-decade as I have come to know more and more LGBTQIA individuals and the ways they have been hurt, as well as have realized the impossibility of a God that would set up a “plan” that is totally impossible for a huge segment of His children to participate in, all within a church whose policies and positions assert that that is exactly what God has done: something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong with how things are currently set up. I don’t know yet what is right. But, Father, something is so incredibly wrong. We’re sorry to any LGBTQIA person who was given false hope by our story, or who used our story as part of the basis for their life-decisions. We honor your decisions, whatever they are, and we’re sorry for any way in which our current trajectory might be unsettling or alarming. I, Josh, am sorry to the many LGBTQIA people over the years that I subconsciously saw myself as different than. I am no different than you, and any degree to which I held on to the idea that I could be gay without being gay was, I see now, a manifestation of lingering internalized homophobia born of decades of being told this part of me was evil. It was an effort to belong to the “in-group” (heterosexual members of the Mormon Church) that I was actually not a part of. Josh also writes that his views have evolved regarding his church’s stance on homosexuality, which he believes fills LGBT people “with self-loathing and internalized homophobia.” “I have spent my entire life conforming to every standard of the LDS faith because I believed it was what God wanted me to do,” he continues. “I believed this because every mentor, every exemplar, every religious teacher, every therapist, every leader I ever grew up listening to and trusting told me that that was the only way I could return to live with God. There was an emphasis on ’perfect obedience’ and yet, over the course of my lifetime, the list of things said by these trusted leaders about my sexual orientation was profoundly inconsistent and confusing.” Josh, who works in private practice helping those “with sexual identity issues and unwanted sexual attractions and/or behaviors,” has been accused in the past of practicing “ex-gay” conversion therapy, which he has denied. “I do not practice, nor do I believe in, reparative therapy or change therapy,” he said. “Quite the opposite, my therapeutic stance is one that favors (but does not depend on) the idea that sexual orientation is immutable.” Josh says on his blog that he and Lolly will continue co-parenting their daughters on a large homestead, adding, “We can continue to be the family we have always been, and we can add to that family.”

I could be wrong, but I think it's a satire of Bravo TV. At least, I hope so...

May I suggest, get a Movie Pass from Costco. It works in most theaters. For $89.99, you can watch 1 2-D movie a day for a year with no additional fees. It renews at $9.99 a month thereafter.

Nothing but love from me!

A little more than half of domestic gross is thanks to you!

This one cost $3.5M if I remember correctly. This one will be profitable. I doubt any of the principals have a back-end deal.

Luca Guadagnino Plans to Address the AIDS Epidemic in Call Me by Your NameSequel By Jackson McHenry While Call Me by Your Name skirted many of the typical tropes of gay love story, its sequel may tackle one of them directly: the specter of HIV and AIDS. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Guadagnino said the sequel, which will likely be set in the late 1980s around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, will certainly address the epidemic. “I think it’s going to be a very relevant part of the story,” he said. “I think Elio [Timothée Chalamet] will be a cinephile, and I’d like him to be in a movie theater watching Paul Vecchiali’s Once More … That could be the first scene [in the sequel].” Once More (also known as Encore) was released in 1988 and was the first French feature film to address the disease. If that were the opening scene, then the sequel would a far different tone than the sunnier original (and André Aciman’s original novel), that, it seems, is Guadagnino’s intention. “In my opinion, Call Me can be the first chapter of the chronicles of the life of these people that we met in this movie,” he said. “If the first one is a story of coming of age and becoming a young man, maybe the next chapter will be, what is the position of the young man in the world, what does he want — and what is left a few years later of such an emotional punch that made him who he is?” Not to give Luca any notes, but if we open with Elio watching Once More and wearing Billowy, the hand-me-down shirt he got from Oliver, that might be too much to bear.

Something To look Forward To.... Meryl Streep Is Joining the Cast of Big Little Lies Season Two By Maria Elena Fernandez Emmy winner Alexander Skarsgård has been staying vague about a possible return to Big Little Lies, but we know who will play Perry’s mama: Meryl Streep. HBO has announced that the three-time Oscar winner will be joining the show in season two as Mary Louis Wright. According to the casting breakdown, “concerned for the well-being of her grandchildren following her son Perry’s death, Mary Louise arrives in Monterey searching for answers.” No word on how much she’ll figure into the new season, but expect a lot of Emmy-worthy standoffs between Celeste (Nicole Kidman) and her mother-in-law. HBO announced last month that the seven-episode second season will be directed by Andrea Arnold (Transparent, I Love Dick) and written entirely again by David E. Kelley, based on a story by Liane Moriarty. Kidman and Reese Witherspoon are resuming their dual roles as stars of the show and executive producers. In addition to Streep, producers are also casting for Celeste’s nanny and the mayor of Monterey, according to a casting breakdown obtained by Vulture.

So Uh, the Guy Who Played Barney Is Now a Tantric Sex Specialist By Madeleine Aggeler David Joyner, the man who played friendly purple dinosaur Barney throughout the nineties, now runs a tantric sex business called Tantra Harmony. Feel old yet? According to a story published on Tuesday by Vice, Joyner started his practice in 2004. For $350, Joyner’s clients, or “goddesses,” get a full session which can include a ritual bath, chakra balancing, a massage, and possibly an orgasm to help release all of your blocked energy. “It is time for women to understand their true worth and the true essence they have to offer to the world,” Joyner writes on his website. “The true spirit of a woman that lies within, must now take its true and rightful place, and shine its light for all to see. This is my goal!!! This is my calling!!! This is my mission!!!” The legality of Joyner’s personal mission, however, is debatable. According to Vice, one of the ways he believes in helping his clients reach a “higher and more blissful state of awareness” is though penetrative, unprotected sex (he says condoms “block the energy.”) (He also told Vice “When you go down on a woman (orally), it should be just like you’re saying grace, like blessing the food you’re about to receive. No food in the world can compare to goddess nectar because spirit is involved. Before you taste the goddess nectar, give thanks. Say grace. I would love women to understand how powerful that energy is.” ) None of the three clients that Vice spoke to said they felt pressured or coerced into sex, but if one of his “goddesses” complained, Joyner could potentially be charged with solicitation in the state of California for massaging someone with the intent of causing arousal. Joyner began practicing Tantra in the 1980s, and while attorneys for Barney & Friends told him he couldn’t practice it while playing the character, he says Tantra helped him “maintain an abundance of joy during the process.” Read the full story here, and listen to the “I Love You Song” in a very different light below.

Nothing for Luca Guadagnino:mad: But yay - nominated for Best Picture! And for song!

Yay, Timothée Chalamet and James Ivory were nominated!

No nomination for either Michael Stuhlbarg or Armie Hammer...

would be easier to just take off the clothes from the man...

I would suggest a re-do to Mr. Tovey. The statue had no clothes on!

What a Sophie’s Choice...

Yes, a second season has been announced.

Did anyone watch last night's special premier showing, after the SAG Awards? I was left wanting...thoughts?

So, Ruth Bader Ginsburg loves CMBYN. Talk about validation for my taste.

Quite possibly, an unexplored bias of mine - but I'd rather be the youngest Gen X-er than the oldest Millennial

LOL - isn't that Priyanka Chopra, the star of the show?