This week’s LGBTQ media highs and lows:

Highs:

HBO will back the incredibly talented Silas Howard (of Tribe 8) in creating a film about the life of Billy Tipton. Howard also made What I Love About Dying,a documentary about the late activist and writer Kris Kovick. Exactly Like You is still in the beginning stages. (afterellen.com)

“The Silver Ring Thing,” an abstinence-based, hetero-centric sex education program has been recognized as an Evangelical Christian program, and has been denied federal funding. The ACLU and the Department of Health & Human Services decided that this faith-based program isn’t fit for our tax dollars. (CNN.com, Washington Post).

A new play, “Christine Jorgenson Reveals” documents the life of glamorous transgender cover girl Christine Jorgenson. (NY Times).

Michelle Tea (author of Rent Girl) has just come out with a novel called Rose of No Man’s Land about the coming-of-age of a queer girl in the suburbs of Massachusetts. (Time Out New York)

Next week is LGBT Health Awareness week:http://www.lgbthealth.net/awarenessweek05/events.html, and just in time, Liz Taylor has donated a mobile medical unit for HIV to New Orleans to celebrate her 40th birthday! (msnbc.com).

Lows:

Harper’s Magazine’s recent article “Out of Control” by Celia Farber, in an attempt to go against the grain, offers a crap argument against the long-held belief that HIV causes AIDS, pissing off every major AIDS activist group in the world. (http://www.harpers.org/MostRecentCover.html)

Gay Public Access television in NYC maybe in danger of getting the boot after pending legislation and a possible FCC ruling. (Time Out New York).

A new gay genetics theory poses that a quarter of mothers with more than one gay son process X chromosomes in a specific way, getting gay conversion therapists up in arms, because they need to keep the hope alive for “sexual reorientation.” The problem with these studies is that if LGBTQ folk try to gain rights and visibility by using genetics, the larger issue is that whether born gay or turned gay, bigotry and discrimination will still exist.

Even though there hasn’t been much about it in US press, the governor of Moscow has banned the first gay pride.

Transgender issues underreported: Helena Stone, Lily McBeth, and Jamie Faucon.

Brokeback loses for best picture.

JT Leroy’s exploitative deception is said to become a movie. (The Advocate)