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LGBT History Month: The AIDS Masterpiece of a Lost Disco Pioneer, It's just a coincidence that LGBT History Month occurs during our culturally appointed Scariest Time of the Year—it’s positioned to coincide with National Coming Out Day (October 11) and to commemorate the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which took place October 14, 1979, not with All Hallow's Eve. But what a coincidence it is, given the horrors gay and queer people have suffered historically. Directly manmade cruelties like bigotry, discrimination, and attendant violence aside, I can't think of anything scarier than the onset of AIDS in the early ‘80s. Before it was a global epidemic, before it was cause, before it united gay men and women to save each other and themselves, before there was even a blood test for it, it was a mystery with several names and still more causalities. No matter how much Larry Kramer I read or stories I hear, I will never comprehend the blindsidi...

Biden's Niece: "You Don't Know Who You're Doing This To!, It's said that connections can open a lot of doors, but Caroline Biden learned last month that jail cell doors aren't among them. Caroline was arrested in September after she allegedly had a violent confrontation with her roommate over unpaid rent. The New York Post reports that it has learned she tried to get off easy once the cops arrived, telling them, "I shouldn't be handcuffed! You don't know who you're doing this to." She also reportedly told them not to go through her handbag because it contained "secret service stuff." After two hours of questioning at the police station, she reportedly asked to use the bathroom. When the door was opened, the police report says, she informed them that she was leaving and attempted to simply slip past the trained police officer blocking her way. She eventually made a phone call (to her semi-powerful father, not her almost-all...

'Noxious Odor' That Shut Down School Turns Out to Be Axe Body Spray, A Brooklyn prep school was briefly shut down yesterday and eight students were hospitalized after a noxious gas was released into one of the classrooms that later turned out to be Axe body spray. EMS were called in to the Medgar Evers College Preparatory School in Crown Heights around 1 p.m. after a "hazardous" substance caused several sixth graders to take ill. In a statement released by the Department of Education, the incident was blamed on "Axe Spray" being released inside the classroom by a student. The statement goes on to say that the incident is being investigation and "disciplinary action is pending." NewsFeed points out that Pennsylvania high school went so far as to ban Axe from its halls following the hospitalization of one of its students. In Connecticut, a high school's fire alarm was set off by a student using an "overabundance" of the spray...

Hero Bus Driver Stops to Save Woman from Jumping Off a Bridge, Buffalo bus driver Darnell "Big Country" Barton says he only did what he felt he was supposed to do when he stopped his bus to rescue a woman threatening to jump from an overpass above the Scajaquada Expressway. It was just another Friday afternoon for the public transportation employee who was heading south toward Buffalo State College with a bus full of McKinley High School students. "It didn't seem real because what was going on around, traffic and pedestrians were going by as normal," Barton told WIVB, recalling the sight of a woman preparing to jump off the overpass's narrow ledge. Security footage from inside the bus shows Barton pull the bus over and quickly walk up to the woman in an effort to grab her before she had a chance to do the unthinkable. "She was distraught, she was distant, she was really disconnected," he said. "I grabbed her arm and put my arm around ...

Toronto Cops Are Investigating Mayor Rob Ford's Drug Habit, This morning the Toronto Police Department released a 500-page application for a search warrant used in the arrest of Sandro Lisi, a drug dealer who served as a driver to Mayor Rob Ford. It makes clear that Rob Ford uses drugs, and the police are pursuing a criminal investigation into his behavior. Toronto reporters are tearing through the document as we speak. The photo above—which was posted to Twitter by Toronto Star reporter Robyn Doolittle, though without much context—clearly shows that Ford was under surveillance by the police. According to quotes from the document posted by the Star's live updates, the Toronto Police Department dispatched a detective to investigate reports in Gawker and the Star that Ford was filmed smoking crack cocaine. The report quotes a Ford staffer, who was interviewed by the cops in June, telling cops that "he doesn't know where the mayor got marijuana from but has heard t...

FAA Allows Portable Electronic Devices to Be Used During Entire Flight, The Federal Aviation Administration today made historic changes to its longstanding Portable Electronic Devices (PEDs) policy, officially allowing airlines to grant passengers permission to use PEDs "during all phases of flight." In its official press release, the FAA said implementation of the new policy among airlines will take time as carriers must prove that their fleets can handle the usage of multiple PEDs gate-to-gate, but the agency expects that by the end of this year, passengers will "be able to read e-books, play games, and watch videos on their devices during all phases of flight, with very limited exceptions." Those exceptions include the use of cellphones or tablets to make phone calls or send text messages during takeoff and landing, which will remain prohibited. Also, all electronic devices with cellular or WiFi service must be set to "airplane mode" during tha...

Blessed Be Halloween, America's Only Honest Holiday, Halloween digs itself out of the chilly autumn ground for a few weeks each year, too weird and primal for governments or religions to claim. It is an ancient pagan harvest festival and a leering plastic skeleton in a front-yard cemetery of styrofoam tombstones. It is candy and liquor, sex and death, and the only "moral lesson" of Halloween is a sneering threat from a child in the night: Give me mine or you'll get yours, mister. It is the only honest American holiday. Late October is also the happiest time of year, with leaves crunching under your shoes and a hint of woodsmoke in the crisp air. Great piles of squash and pumpkins are stacked around the markets, and people look wonderful again—women in scarves and boots, men in wool coats, the stench of summer forgotten. Storefronts are suddenly revealed to hold secret societies of retail artists, as strange and whimsical displays pop up in the shops that genera...

Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson Had Six-Year Affair, The twelve jurors in Britain’s phone-hacking trial against several staffers of the shuttered Murdoch tabloid News of the World were told on Thursday that former editors Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson, both charged with several counts of conspiracy to intercept communications and impede a police investigation, had maintained a six-year-long affair over the course of their employment at News International. The relationship apparently lasted between 1998 and 2004, during which both were married to other people. Gawker reported in July that prosecutors had discovered evidence during pre-trial discovery that, along with Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, Coulson had had an affair with Brooks. This development is likely to further embarrass the administration of Prime Minister David Cameron, under whom Coulson served as communications director between May 2010 and early 2011, when he resigned amid his own administration’s heighten...

How the Ouija Board Became the Mouthpiece of the Devil, At Halloween parties across this dreaded land tonight, people will set up Ouija boards and tarot decks for the traditional drunken fortune teller's table of occult items. At least a few people will freak out when the Ouija board spells out something maniacal like "KILL YOU FOREVER GOOD-BYE DADDY," and again we will wonder why we keep these apparent portals to Hell in our closet alongside Connect Four and Monopoly. According to this Smithsonian Magazine history of the mysterious board game, it wasn't until The Exorcist terrified everybody in the 1970s that the Ouija became associated with Satanic possession, because the little girl in the movie is possessed by an ancient Iraqi goblin named "Pazuzu." For nearly a century before that 1973 movie, talking boards were a fun way to try to communicate with your dead relatives, in Heaven. (The ghosts would never admit to being tortured in Hell forever. Am...

Al Roker in Blackface and Other Today Show Halloween Horrors, Halloween descended on New York like Hallowe'en upon a city Thursday, which meant the goons and goblins over at the Today show were up at dawn, peeling off their flaky reptile hides and stretching the skin of real people over their spikey, misshapen bodies. On top of that: a Halloween costume, as is appropriate for the day. Weatherman Al Roker, taking a page out of Proactiv spokesperson Julianne Hough's playbook (the play the book is for is an 1865 production of Our American Cousin), dressed up as Julianne Hough dressed up as Mr. T. dressed up as B.A. Baracus from The A-Team. I pity the fool who doesn't enjoy this clever costume. "The Man" Matt Lauer tucked his genitals snugly inside a pair of pantyhose and inserted a pair of fake breasts with pert little nipples into the women's one-piece he happened to be wearing, then realized he was dressed as Pamela Anderson dressed as C.J. Parker from B...

Michael Hayden, the Voice of Terror, Michael Hayden, the former head of the NSA and the CIA, is the official mouthpiece of the American surveillance state. His blithe, unquestioning acceptance of the idea that privacy is a foolish notion is horrifying. And for that, he is valuable. Michael Hayden believes that his experience makes him a voice of moderation and maturity in the debate that has arisen over the NSA's vast global spying program. In fact, he is the voice of extremity. He is the living embodiment of the belief that surveillance is its own justification—that appeals for privacy on the basis of morality or ethics are ridiculous. He represents the philosophy of the primacy of the surveillance state: The democratically elected government exists to serve the spies, not the other way around. Nowhere is this better revealed than in Hayden's Wall Street Journal op-ed today, a masterpiece of the "Whining to Friendly Ears" genre. The purpose of Hayden's p...

Everything That's Wrong with HealthCare.gov, The HealthCare.gov launch did not go so well. Some people paid the website a visit only to be greeted by a blank screen. Others found error messages or talked to misleading call center reps or had their personal information compromised. The whole thing is borked, and everybody knows it. It's been less than a month now since the much anticipated home for the Obama administration's healthcare exchange went online, and it's going to be at least another month before it actually works. The problems are by no means minor. Reuters reports that hundreds of thousands of Americans could lose access to low-cost health insurance as a result of the botched launch. At this point, everybody's playing the blame game pretty hard. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius blames the (too many) contractors who built the site. Obama blames himself. Americans, for some reason, seem to want to blame the girl in the stock pho...

NBC Is About To Pick Up A Sitcom From Tina Fey About Abducted Girls, I've just been tipped off that 30 Rock producers Tina Fey and Robert Carlock have just received a straight-to-series episode order for a new comedy starring Ellie Kemper. The premise? Girls who've been abducted. I'm told NBC executives aren't fans of the script, which will likely receive a 13-episode order rather than the standard six, and are worried that the premise might be offensive. Carlock and Fey are co-writers on the project, and wrote it as a spec months back. NBC had been sitting on the script for a few weeks, until pressure from Fey and Carlock's WME agents forced them to make a commitment, lest they lose the project to another network. Universal Television (where Fey and Carlock's producing deal is based) and 3 Arts (the management and production company that reps Fey and serves as a producer on her projects) have already sold two successful series outside of NBC: The Mindy P...

Niglets' Warned Not to Trick-or-Treat in 'White Neighborhood, Better luck next year to the woman who will be handing out fat-shaming letters to overweight trick-or-treaters because America's Worst Neighbor officially resides in Norfolk, Virginia. A since-removed Craigslist post attributed to someone living in Norfolk neighborhood of Larchmont-Edgewater has riled up residents who say the sentiments expressed therein are not their own. Writing under the headline "Reminder: Overage Trick Or Treaters Stay Out!," the anonymous poster starts by ranting about "kids older than twelve going house to house for free candy." We hate seeing kids older than twelve going house to house for free candy. Doing so is illegal and this year we will be calling the police on you bastards. Overage trick or treating is a Class 4 misdemeanor and carries a $250 fine. This will also go on your criminal record if you don’t have one already. Were it to have ended there, the...

Your Coffee Is Getting Better, Not That You'll Notice, What's that? You detected a sweeter, gentler, more luxurious flavor in your Folgers this morning? Why yes, its quality has improved. You liar. Coffee snobbery, like wine snobbery, is bullshit. The average American who fancies himself a dandy amateur barista would sing the haughty praises of a cup of Cafe Bustelo made in a $20 Mr. Coffee machine if you poured it into an interesting mug and called it "Ethiopian Yirgacheffe" and charged $4.50 for it. So we will assert up front that all but the most drastic changes in the underlying "quality" of mass-produced coffee grounds will be wasted on the general public. That said, Reuters reports that the price of arabica coffee beans (the good ones, relative to robusta beans, the cheaper ones) is falling, meaning more high quality beans in your Maxwell House or whatever. From Reuters: But drinkers detecting more of arabica's distinctively sweeter, gentl...

Megabus Is No Longer the Best Way to Smuggle Drugs, Have you ever ridden Megabus, Peter Pan, or any old grungy Chinatown bus around the Eastern Seaboard and thought to yourself, Man, this would be a great way for someone to run drugs? Well, the good news is you're not alone; many people have had that idea. Don't try to turn that fantasy into a reality, however, because the cops are now wise to the game. The Burlington Free Press reports that a man was arrested in Vermont this week with 30 grams of crack he'd smuggled via a Megabus from New York City. This was the fifth time in less than a year that a drug-trafficking suspect has been busted in Vermont after disembarking a Megabus. All the arrests have prompted the University of Vermont, which hosts Megabus' Burlington stop, to consider ending its relationship with the company. "We have been working with Megabus since early in the year to find an alternative location for the bus stop that serves both the comp...

Anthony Weiner Claims He Never Asked the Times for That Blowjob, This is the thing about Anthony Weiner: He's just so very, very seductive. Irresistible. He makes you do things you'd never dream of doing. Well, not you. Some people. They just want to surrender to him. The failed mayoral candidate tells GQ's Marshall Sella about how this sad fact undermined his campaign from the start, when he offered himself and his wife, Huma Abedin, up to the New York Times Magazine for the profile, by Jonathan Van Meter, that was to mark his return to political respectability: “The problem was that the story was completely different from what we thought would be written,” he told me. “I thought there’d be thousands of questions about the sexting. But there wasn’t a lot of conversation about that. We had a guy [Van Meter] who wasn’t tough enough. We needed someone to just tear away at me. And not someone who would do something sympathetic…. He wrote an aftermath story, about two inte...

Gay Couple Can't Find Any Homophobes in the Two Most Homophobic States, With the eyes of the nation trained firmly on which state will be next to legalize same-sex marriage, The Daily Show is naturally looking in the opposite direction: Which state will be last. According to statistician Nate Silver, the two states most likely to battle it out for last-past-the-post are Alabama, with its notoriously harsh anti-gay laws, and Mississippi, where sodomy is still a felony. To get a first-hand look at just how tough it's going to be to get those two state on board with this whole "equal rights for all" thing, Madrigal hired two men to play a stereotypically southern gay couple, and sent them to roam the streets in search of homophobia. As it turned out, it was actually tougher to get Alabamians and Mississippians to treat the two gay guys inequitably. "Alabama might as well be blowing Mississippi right now," Madrigal concluded. "They are kinda butt...

Is This the First Google Glass Traffic Ticket?, Probably a murky area of the law right now, but we're thrilled to see a big first step towards criminalizing face computers. San Francisco resident Cecilia Abadie, who describes herself as a "Google Glass pioneer" and "transhumanist," explains her run-in with the analog arm of the law: A cop just stopped me and gave me a ticket for wearing Google Glass while driving! The exact line says: Driving with Monitor visible to Driver (Google Glass). Is #GoogleGlass ilegal while driving or is this cop wrong??? Any legal advice is appreciated!! This happened in California. Do you know any other #GlassExplorers that got a similar ticket anywhere in the US?

Here’s How to Make Subway Conductors Smile, If you’ve spent enough time on the subway in New York, you’ve probably noticed the train-conductors pointing at a striped black-and-white sign each time they pull into a station. The conductors are required to do this to show they’ve fully arrived on the platform. So Yosef Lerner and Rose Sacktor decided to have a little fun. Feeling sorry for the conductors who spend their whole day “in that small booth, alone,” they duo decided to stand at subway stations in New York holding special signs knowing the conductors would have to point at them. The video results are pretty endearing. While the best sign they hold is “Point here if you are dead sexy,” they also made many other signs asking the conductors to “point here” if: You are not wearing pants right now
 You have taken a selfie while driving
 You have seen a passenger naked
 Shoot the target with your laser finger [bullseye] You still love Thomas The Tank Engine
 Snape kills D...

Missing Autistic Boy Maybe Spotted on Subway, Then Disappears, Avonte Oquendo, a 14 year-old autistic boy, went missing from his school in Queens almost four weeks ago. Fliers with his picture are everywhere in New York City. And now—finally—he may have been spotted. But! A 13 year-old spotted someone who looks exactly like Avonte on a subway train on Tuesday, and snapped a picture that's now in every paper in town. Their interaction, according to the New York Daily News, went like this: The youngster approached the look-a-like, asking, “Hey, are you Avonte?” according to Tony Herbert, president of the Brooklyn East chapter of the National Action Network. The boy didn’t answer, Herbert said, and the inquiring youth — whose identity was unknown — snapped a picture before he got off the train. He didn't answer. AVONTE OQUENDO IS AUTISTIC AND NONVERBAL. A NON-ANSWER IS ACTUALLY CONFIRMATION. Avonte Oquendo has a greater media presence in the New York City subway system ...

Hero Bus Driver Stops to Save Woman from Jumping Off a Bridge, Buffalo bus driver Darnell "Big Country" Barton says he only did what he felt he was supposed to do when he stopped his bus to rescue a woman threatening to jump from an overpass above the Scajaquada Expressway. It was just another Friday afternoon for the public transportation employee who was heading south toward Buffalo State College with a bus full of McKinley High School students. "It didn't seem real because what was going on around, traffic and pedestrians were going by as normal," Barton told WIVB, recalling the sight of a woman preparing to jump off the overpass's narrow ledge. Security footage from inside the bus shows Barton pull the bus over and quickly walk up to the woman in an effort to grab her before she had a chance to do the unthinkable. "She was distraught, she was distant, she was really disconnected," he said. "I grabbed her arm and put my arm around ...

This is spinal tap, Guitarist Nigel Tufnel is explaining his amplifier to documentary filmmaker Marty DiBergi: It's very special, because, as you can see--the numbers all go to 11. Right across the board. Eleven, 11. . . . And most amps go up to 10? Exactly. Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder? Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not 10. You see, most blokes are going to be playing at 10--you're on 10 on your guitar, where can you go from there? Where? I don't know. Nowhere! Exactly! What we do, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? You put it up to 11. Eleven. Exactly. One louder. Why don't you just make 10 louder, and make 10 be the top number, and make that a little louder? Nigel is so baffled by this notion that he almost stops chewing his gum. "These go to 11," he repeats finally. His faith in that extra push over the cliff is unshakable. Marty DiBergi realizes he's dealing with a ma...

Halloween h20 20 years later, The pre-credits sequence, beginning with the accompanying tune "Mr. Sandman", opened in Langdon, Illinois on October 29, 1998. Marion Whittington, the nurse of Doctor Sam Loomis who had died in 1995, drove up to her home, where she was shocked to see it had been burglarized (or vandalized). Next door, she alerted some neighboring teenaged boys, and after one of them, ice-hockey attired Jimmy Howell, called the police, he went back to her house alone to check it for intruders, with his hockey stick for protection. When he found nothing, other than a ransacked home office and bottles of beer (to steal) from the refrigerator, Miss Whittington was given an all-clear signal to return. Now dark outside, she discovered the power was out, but searched with a flashlight in her office, where there was an empty file folder labeled "LAURIE STRODE." The masked killer Michael Myers was in the house behind her. Sensing trouble and a presence, she...

Scream Queens: Which Horror Movies Made These Actresses Famous?, The notion of "scream queens" might bring to mind blood-soaked damsels in distress, but not all female protagonists in horror movies are helpless victims. Take, for example, the recently released remake of "Carrie," starring this "Kick-Ass" young actress. At first, Carrie White is a shy and guarded high school student with an overbearing mother (played by this veteran flame-haired actress) and harboring a potentially deadly gift. But when pushed too far by her taunting classmates, the victim becomes the victimizer in this classic revenge tale. Check out our gallery of notable actresses and see if you can guess which memorable horror flick turned them into a bona fide scream queen. Jamie Lee Curtis Seemingly ubiquitous thanks to her role as a spokesperson for this healthful yogurt company, Curtis herself comes from Hollywood royalty: Her father was actor Tony Curtis, and her moth...