Matt Bomer

Matt Bomer doesn’t like talking about his private life
And even if the White Collar star did publicly aknowledge he was gay earlier this year, he’s not about to start spilling anytime soon.
“I never really endeavored to hide anything,” Bomer, 34, told me this weekend while promoting his new movie, Magic Mike. “But there were times I chose not to relegate my history to the back page of a magazine, which to me is sort of akin to putting your biography on a bathroom wall.”
Not that he dismisses the importance of being an out actor.
“I had somebody from the military approach me a few weeks ago just saying how this helps people, affects people,” Bomer said. “It brought me to tears.”
I go so far as to suggest that he could be saving young gay people’s lives. “I hope so,” he said. “They need saving, certainly in this day and age as much as ever—no matter how much we think we’ve progressed.”
His coming out was as subtle as they come. Bomer simply thanked his longtime partner, Hollywood publicist Simon Halls, and their three children, Kit, Walker and Henry, when he was honored by the Desert AIDS Fund in Palm Springs in February.
“What we really have to do is stop the adjective before the job title—whether it’s ‘black actor,’ a ‘gay actor’ or ‘anything actor,’” Bomer said. “Everybody thinks that equality comes from identifying people, and that’s not where equality comes from. Equality comes from treating everybody the same regardless of who they are. I hope the media and the press catches on to that because it’s time to move out of 1992.”
Bomer certainly dispels the notion that coming out will hurt an actor’s career.
As you probably know by now, he’s one of the many pieces of man candy actors in Magic Mike (out on Friday), director Steven Soderbergh’s movie inspired by Channing Tatum’s prefame days as a male stripper. “When they called me, I thought, ‘Do they have the wrong number? Did they mean to call the guy from Vampire Diaries?’” Bomer said, laughing. “And at the time I was really skinny so I think there may have been a five-minute window from when I hung up the phone to when I went to the gym.” (FYI: He put on about 15 pounds for the role.)
One dance sequence shows him dressed as a doctor but stripping on top of an audience member who is laying on a gurney on the stage. “Channing [Tatum] told me, ‘You have to use the stretcher and just get up on this girl and grind your junk in her face,’” Bomer remembered.
He did just that. “But this girl was not going to just sit there and be ground upon,” Bomer said. “She started licking me in all kinds of special places and we just kept going…It was one of those situations where you were in an environment where moral parameters are not the same as they are if you’re doing a political drama. You just sort of have to say yes to everything and embrace it.”
Thankfully, Bomer said, his kids are too young for flick.
“But one day when they are old enough, they can watch it,” he said. “I’ll be able to say, ‘Hey, your old man used to be in shape. He might not be anymore, but he used to be in shape. Now, go get me a beer.’”
from E!Online

Organizers of an all-gay cruise on Saturday blamed Moroccan officials for the cancellation of what would have been the first visit of its kind to a Muslim country, but the tourism minister denied the ship was banned and said its passengers were welcome.
Cruise liner Holland America Line and trip organiser RSVP Vacations told the 2,100 holiday-makers aboard the MS Nieuw Amsterdam ship that the July 1 visit to Casablanca had been cancelled.
“Our port agent in Casablanca has advised us that authorities in Morocco have — despite previous confirmations — now denied our scheduled visit,” the two companies said in a letter tweeted to news organizations by passengers of the ship.
“For all of us, this is a very disappointing development,” they added. “It was ultimately the decision by local authorities in Morocco that has necessitated us to adjust our plans.”
The Casablanca visit was supposed to be the first and the only non-European leg of a week-long journey for the cruise liner, which sailed from Barcelona on Friday with mostly American and European passengers.
Morocco’s Tourism Minister Lahcen Haddad said no official decision had been made to prevent the ship from stopping in Morocco.
“We don’t ban cruise ships here and we never ask our visitors about their sexual preferences,” he told Reuters. Asked if the MS Nieuw Amsterdam could still visit Morocco, he said: “They can if the organisers want to”.
Haddad is from the secular Popular Movement Party, a junior partner in Morocco’s ruling coalition led by moderate Islamists of the Justice and Development Party PJD.L.
PJD came to power in December, riding a regional wave of support for Islamist movements amid Arab revolts but saying it would not impose a strict moral code. The tourism sector accounts for 10 percent of Morocco’s GDP and 450,000 jobs.
The cruise ship’s visit had caught the attention of local media in this generally conservative society where the law deems same-gender sexual relationships “lewd or unnatural” and punishes them with six months to three years in jail. No political parties call for ending laws against homosexuality.
Morocco has an Islamic-inspired penal code that bans sex outside marriage and Moroccans buying alcohol, but authorities favour a tolerant brand of Islam in which young urban couples display affection in the street and locals often outnumber tourists in bars and night clubs.
That has partly helped Morocco to attract large numbers of tourists, especially from western Europe, providing much-needed foreign currency and jobs to an economy that lacks the oil riches of neighbouring states.
from Reuters

Sean Eldridge & Chris Hughes

GARRISON, NEW YORK – Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge were married Saturday at their home in Garrison, N.Y. William J. Corbett, a retired village justice of Floral Park, N.Y., officiated.
Mr. Hughes 28, works from New York, Garrison and Washington as the publisher and editor in chief of The New Republic magazine. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. He founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin. Mr. Hughes also led the online organizing for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. He is the son of Brenda Hughes and Arlyn Ray Hughes of Wilmington, N.C. His mother retired as a mathematics teacher at Newton-Conover High School in Newton, N.C. His father retired as a sales manager at the Snyder Paper Company in Hickory, N.C.
Mr. Eldridge, 25, is the founder and treasurer of Protect Our Democracy, an advocacy group based in Garrison that seeks campaign finance reform. He is also the president of Hudson River Ventures, an investment firm in Garrison. He was until July 2011, the political director of Freedom to Marry, a group that advocates same-sex marriage. He graduated from Brown.
He is the son of Dr. Sarah Taub of Toledo, Ohio, and Dr. Stephen A. Eldridge of Ann Arbor, Mich. His mother is a family physician at the Milan Family Practice in Milan, Mich. His father is a diagnostic and interventional radiologist in private practice in Toledo.
The couple met in November 2005 through a college acquaintance of Mr. Eldridge’s at a brunch in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Mass. Mr. Eldridge was working as a customer service manager for a moving company in Somerville, Mass., and Mr. Hughes was a senior at Harvard, and already a founder of Facebook.
“He was very intelligent and charismatic,” Mr. Hughes said of Mr. Eldridge. “He was very kind and politically engaged, and he cared about the world around us. All of that was very attractive to me.”
Mr. Eldridge was equally attracted. A week later, he asked Mr. Hughes out on a date.
“I think we shared a lot of important, common interests,” Mr. Eldridge said. “We have a love of philosophy, politics and literature. He was one of the most intelligent and ambitious people I had ever met.”
Their first date was at Temple Bar in Cambridge. While Mr. Hughes did not remember what he drank, he is certain that Mr. Eldridge, then 19, did not consume alcohol.
“He couldn’t legally drink,” Mr. Hughes said.
Still, Mr. Eldridge said that he and Mr. Hughes “had a great time.”
“It all happened very fast,” Mr. Eldridge recalled.
from The New York Times
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