Archie Comics

Archie, Betty, Veronica and Jughead have a new friend: Archie Comics’ first openly gay character.
Kevin Keller, who first appears in Veronica #202 released on September 1st, 2010, is a teenager at  Riverdale High School, the fictional universe that has been entertaining kids of all ages since 1939.
“In the last year or two, we’ve been introducing a lot of new characters: Diverse characters, characters with different ethnicities. With trying to be diverse, we wanted to have everybody at the table,” said cartoonist Dan Parent, who’s writing and drawing the issue. “We knew at some point we wanted to introduce a gay character, and when I came up with the story idea, we felt it worked in context with this story.”
In his introductory story, titled “Isn’t it Bromantic?,” Kevin’s good looks get the attention of Veronica, who doesn’t know he’s gay because he’s the new kid in town. Her thwarted attempts at winning his attraction amuse the other characters – particularly Jughead.
“They just like watching Veronica making a fool of herself, trying to get this guy to like her,” Parent  said. “At the beginning of the book, Kevin tells Jughead first that he’s gay. And Kevin feels kind of bad and wants to tell Veronica why he’s not interested. But Jughead keeps saying, ‘No, you should wait to tell her,’ because he’s enjoying watching Veronica’s antics.”
Parent said the story works because it’s wasn’t something radical concocted just to introduce a gay character. “The story is very much in the true context of our Archie stories,” he said. “It’s Veronica being Veronica. The fact that there’s a gay character in the story isn’t a big deal to the characters. We didn’t do something with turmoil. The guy just happens to be gay, and the characters accept it, and that’s it.”
The longtime Archie cartoonist said Archie Comics wants to reflect what high schools are like in America, where being gay “isn’t a big deal anymore.”
“My daughter has openly gay kids in her high school and it’s accepted,” Parent pointed out. “Obviously this isn’t the case everywhere in the country. There are struggles that gay people have. But gay kids in high schools isn’t the big deal it used to be, and we want to reflect the way being gay is accepted in today’s society.”
In fact, the writer thinks one of the reasons Jughead is the first person told about Kevin’s sexual orientation is that he was always a “different” character in the Archie universe. “Jughead’s got a mind of his own. I think he’d be the first person to be accepting of a gay character,” Parent said.
The introduction of a gay character comes on the heels of several notable changes in Archie Comics. After a redesign to update the characters a bit for modern audiences, Archie Comics titles have started doing parodies of current pop culture stories and just introduced an interracial relationship for icon Archie with Josie and the Pussycats character Valerie.
“We’re trying to show that Riverdale is an accepting community, that everyone is welcome in Riverdale,” he said. “We’re trying to show that Riverdale is that ideal town that everybody wants to be a part of.”
from Newsarama
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Just One Look... #153

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David Yost

Almost 20 years after back-flipping onto kids’ TV sets as the nerdy Blue Ranger on Fox’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, David Yost opened up to No Pink Spandex  about his stint on the show. And during the three-part interview, Yost revealed just what happened behind-the-scenes when his character was written off the show (and sent to live on another planet): Yost actually walked off set one day after being teased about being gay.
“The reason that I walked off is that I was called ‘faggot’ one too many times,” Yost says in the clip. “I had just heard that several times while working on the show from creators, producers, writers, directors… Basically I just felt like i was continually being told I was not worthy of being where I am because I’m a gay person. And I’m not supposed to be an actor. And I’m not a superhero.”
After leaving the show, Yost says he experienced a nervous breakdown. But he’s been doing just fine since then, working behind the camera as a producer for reality TV shows like Temptation Island. Still, the fact that such intolerance might have taken place on set of Power Rangers kind of kills the nostalgic buzz we all have for the show, no?
from Entertainment Weekly

Ken Mehlman

Had a former chairman of the Republican National Committee  announced in 2004 that he was gay, it would have been a bombshell. In that hard-fought election year, Republicans and Democrats were rushing to condemn a court for establishing the right to same-sex marriage in Massachusetts.
Six years later, in a midterm election cycle that is otherwise fierce, campaigns are largely silent on the issue of same-sex marriage — even as two federal courts have issued similar decisions in recent months upholding the rights of gay people to wed. And when Ken Mehlman, who ran President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004 and then became the party’s chairman, said in an interview in The Atlantic this week that he is gay and is working to support a campaign for same-sex marriage, it was met with little controversy.
Even the commentary accusing him of hypocrisy seemed outweighed by people who wished him well, or merely shrugged.
The muted reaction reflects not only changing values in the country generally, but also, more notably, among many Republicans and conservatives.
The center of gravity of the conservative movement in this election season is with fiscal conservatives. The Tea Party is infusing the Republican Party with new energy, and Tea Party leaders and supporters say they do not want to talk about social issues: even if they do not personally support same-sex marriage or abortion, they think the Republican Party spent too much time talking about them and not enough time trying to rein in spending.
As head of the Republican National Committee, Mr. Mehlman advocated the Bush administration’s push for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, which Republicans had hoped would galvanize the party’s conservative base in 2006.
Now he joins several other members of the Bush inner circle who have publicly stated their support for same-sex marriage. Former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has a daughter who is gay, has said he supports the right of gay people to marry, as has the former first lady Laura Bush.
“There are now more and more Republicans, and conservative Republicans, who have talked about this issue through the prism of being an equal rights issue, and being an issue that should not define the conservative movement and the party,” said Steve Schmidt, who was part of that inner circle as a spokesman and strategist for Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign.
Mr. Schmidt spoke of his support for same-sex marriage in 2008 to the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay rights group, when he was chief strategist for John McCain’s presidential run. Like Mr. Cheney, he spoke in personal terms, telling the group that his sister is gay and that she and her partner are an important part of his and his children’s lives.
Matthew Dowd, another top strategist for Mr. Bush who broke with him after the re-election campaign, said that same-sex marriage had ceased to be a big issue for many voters — including conservatives and religious ones — even in 2004. In polling and focus groups before that election, he said, Republicans and conservatives cited terrorism, taxes and the war in Iraq as the issues that would move them to the polls.
And even as many commentators declared that ballot initiatives on same-sex marriage that year drove conservatives to the polls for Mr. Bush, Mr. Dowd said that analyses showed that the initiatives stirred no statistical increase in turnout among conservatives or religious voters.
Mr. Mehlman told The Atlantic, “It’s taken me 43 years to get comfortable with this part of my life.” His announcement — and the relatively passive reaction to it — reflects how the country has shifted.
“It’s just not politics, it’s Hollywood folks who struggle with this, people in the news media struggle with it, athletes struggle with it, this question of whether or not they should be open,” Mr. Dowd said. “What we’re seeing is more and more people deciding that staying quiet for the rest of their lives is no longer an option.”
Still, voters may not want to institute same-sex marriage — recent campaigns failed in Northeastern states like New York, New Jersey and Maine, which are usually considered the province of liberalism.
And not all conservatives are willing to concede the fight on social issues.
Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, said Mr. Mehlman’s announcement helped explain “the scandalous failure” of the Republican establishment to fight same-sex marriage. “It is important for the conservative movement that the Republican Party remains committed to its longtime stance on core social issues,” he said.
But polls show acceptance of gays growing among Americans, on a variety of measures. In a Gallup poll in May, 52 percent of Americans said that gay and lesbian relations were “morally acceptable” — the first time that support had crossed what the polling group called the “symbolic threshold” of 50 percent.
Among conservatives, 33 percent agreed, up five percentage points since May 2006. Another Gallup poll in May found that 70 percent of Americans — and 53 percent of conservatives — favored allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military.
The shift is being driven largely by demographics, as a younger generation grows up with more discussion and acceptance of gay rights.
In a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in March 2004, a plurality of Americans under 45 — 35 percent — said there should be no legal recognition of gay and lesbian relationships. Forty-five percent of Americans 45 and older said the same. By April 2010, just 24 percent of Americans ages 18 to 44 surveyed said that there should be no legal recognition, and 35 percent of Americans 45 and older said the same.
“People want to make sure that government is not intrusive in our lives,” Mr. Dowd said. “Whether it’s the economy or our social lives.”
from The New York Times
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President Barack Obama

In the fall of 1912, as his campaign for president entered its final stage, Woodrow Wilson was speaking in Brooklyn when he was asked for his opinion on women’s suffrage. The issue was very much in the political ether, but Wilson had declined to take a stand on it. According to John Milton Cooper’s excellent biography  of the twenty-eighth president, he responded by insisting that it was “not a question that is dealt with by the national government at all.” The woman who had asked the question was apparently displeased by this blatant dodge. “I am speaking to you as an American, Mr. Wilson,” she retorted.
I am speaking to you as an American: It was a wonderful rebuke, one that anticipated the rhetoric of Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders who would not rail against America but instead demand to be fully part of it. Wilson, however, was unmoved. And his slippery treatment of women’s suffrage—like his slippery approach on matters of race—did not end once he was in the White House. Running for reelection four years later, he was still playing the same exasperating game. That year, the Democrats did not endorse a constitutional amendment providing for women’s suffrage but, instead, called on the states to extend voting rights to women. Such a half-measure looks cowardly in retrospect, of course; but it also looked cowardly at the time. In November 1916, The New Republic excoriated Wilson for his weak stand on the issue. During his reelection campaign, TNR wrote, Wilson had told a group of suffragists that “[h]e was with them,” even as “he confessed to a ‘little impatience’ as to their anxiety about method.” From this, the magazine concluded that the president had “at best a vague, benign feeling about [the issue], and no conviction whatever that woman suffrage was creating a national situation which called for thorough sincerity, nerve and will.”
An evasive stance on a controversial civil rights issue from a liberal president; an insistence that the issue is primarily local, rather than national, in character; a complete failure of sincerity, nerve, and will: If these things sound familiar in 2010, it is because Barack Obama is taking exactly the same approach on gay marriage.
My colleague James Downie has assembled a fascinating timeline of Obama’s statements on gay marriage over the past 14 years, stretching from 1996 to earlier this month, when the White House responded to a judge’s ruling on Prop 8 by reiterating that it opposes same-sex marriage. What the timeline shows is a pattern that can only be described as illogical and cynical. Obama argues that he is against gay marriage while also opposing efforts like Prop 8 that would ban it. He justifies this by saying that state constitutions should not be used to reduce rights. (His exact words: “I am not in favor of gay marriage, but when you’re playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that that is not what America is about.”) Obama appears to be saying that it is fine to prohibit gay people from getting married, as long as the vehicle for doing so is not a constitution. Presumably, then, he supports the numerous states that have banned same-sex marriage through other means, without resorting to a constitutional amendment? If so, he might be the only person in the country to occupy this narrow, and frankly absurd, slice of intellectual terrain. Obama has also said he favors civil unions rather than gay marriage because the question of where and how to apply the label “marriage” is a religious one. This argument makes even less sense than his stance on state constitutions, since marriage, for better or for worse, is very much a government matter.
Obama and those around him seem unaware that all of this is a problem; a look at some of the lessons from Wilson’s experience might help to clarify why they ought to reconsider. The first lesson is that history does not look kindly on this type of presidential conduct. Wilson is today remembered as a near-great president, but his indifference on questions of gender and race is more than a bit unflattering in retrospect. Second, like Wilson, Obama is running out of time to stay ahead of history. In 1912, women’s suffrage was hardly an outlandish cause; one of the three major presidential contenders that year, Teddy Roosevelt, came out in favor of it, even as Wilson remained mum. Similarly, on gay marriage, Obama is now to the right of Laura Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, according to a new CNN poll, 52 percent of the American people.
Third, there is the problem of the example Obama is setting for the rest of the world. According to Cooper, when Wilson eventually did endorse the women’s suffrage amendment, on January 9, 1918, it was at least partly because of foreign policy. “As one of the Democrats [who had spoken to Wilson that day] recalled two weeks later, the president told them that passing the amendment would send the right message to the world and would acknowledge women’s service to the nation,” Cooper explains. Months later, addressing the Senate on the issue, Wilson cited the “unusual circumstances of a world war in which we stand and are judged in the view of our own people and our own consciences but also in the view of all the nations and peoples.” The point, it seemed, was that you could not wage war in the name of democratic ideals while barring half your population from voting. Obviously, the lesson here does not map perfectly onto contemporary politics—Obama would not exactly increase his popularity in the Muslim world by endorsing gay marriage—but neither does it make sense to think of gay marriage as completely disconnected from international affairs. Obama has said that he wants to restore American moral leadership in the world. But how can he claim the mantle of moral leadership when we are being outpaced by so many countries and so many foreign leaders on one of the central civil rights issues of our time?
The final lesson from Wilson is that what a president says and does matters. The day after Wilson’s January 9 statement, the House endorsed women’s suffrage by two votes. Wilson, albeit years late to the cause, would go on to lobby senators and, eventually, the governor of Tennessee, which became the final state to ratify the nineteenth amendment. Obama, meanwhile, seems to have convinced himself that he can’t make a difference on gay marriage, so why wade into the issue? But, while he may not realize it, Obama is already leading on gay marriage; he is just leading in the wrong direction. Every time Obama or a surrogate reiterates his position, it reinforces the idea that gay marriage is a bit too scary for the political mainstream. Worse, Obama’s stance seems to be a way of conveying to the country that he knows a lot of people still aren’t completely comfortable admitting gays and lesbians as full participants in American life, and that this is OK because he isn’t either. It is about the most cynical gesture you can imagine from an allegedly liberal leader—and we deserve better. I am speaking to you as an American, Mr. Obama.
from The New Republic / Richard Just

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Harry Popper Condom

Studio stands up against Swiss manufacturer of ‘Harry Popper’ condoms for copyright infringement.
It’s the boy wizard as you’ve never seen him before. He has the trademark round spectacles and the regulation magic wand. But his tongue is extended in a lascivious manner and his thoughts are purely carnal. For good measure, he is in the guise of a pink, pimpled prophylactic.
Unsurprisingly, not everyone is amused. Warner Bros this week sued the Swiss manufacturer of the “Harry Popper” condoms for copyright infringement. “The image of my client is in danger,” a studio lawyer complained to the Swiss newspaper Bote. “This is clearly a reference to the film and fictional character of Harry Potter. Everyone who sees the condoms automatically thinks of Harry Potter.” The Harry Popper condoms have reportedly been on sale since 2006.
The Harry Potter brand is worth an estimated £15bn and lawyers for both Warner Bros and author JK Rowling have earned a reputation for protecting their product. In 2008, the studio launched a similar lawsuit against a Hindi-language Bollywood production, Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors. The suit was eventually thrown out by an Indian court.
For the time being, condom manufacturers Magic X are standing firm. “Our product has nothing to do with Harry Potter,” claimed a spokesperson for the company.
from The Guardian
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