Tasty Tuesday

TV talk show host Maury Povich was hit with a $100 million lawsuit Monday by a producer who alleges she was forced to expose herself in the studio for crude videos that were shown to guests of the show.



Rare documents chronicling the rise and fall of Oscar Wilde together with a poem by Wilde's gay lover, Lord Alfred Douglas are among the literary treasures donated to the University of Leeds yesterday by a wealthy New York based couple.

The newly acquired treasures include Wilde's lectures notes from his 1882 tour of America, marking his rise to fame in addition to a rare copy of the Oxford University journal The Chameleon that played a part in his fall from grace.



The Vatican has banned a service for gay Catholics at a church in Bavaria due to its close proximity to a gay pride festival being held in the area.

Josef Heigl, vicar general for the diocese of Augsburg told the Reuters news agency that the Vatican had stopped the service, which has been taking place during the Christopher Street Day gay festival since 1999, to allay fears that it might give the impression that the Catholic Church endorsed gay rights.


A fairy tale about gay marriage has sparked a civil rights debate in Massachusetts, the only US state where gays and lesbians can legally wed, after a teacher read the story to a classroom of seven year olds without warning parents first.

A parents' rights group said overnight it may sue the public school in the affluent suburb of Lexington, about 19 km west of Boston, where a teacher used the book King & King in a lesson about different types of weddings.

"It's just so heinous and objectionable that they would do this," said Brian Camenker, president of the Parents Rights Coalition, a conservative Massachusetts-based advocacy group.

Mr Camenker said he believes the school, Joseph Estabrook Elementary, broke a 1996 Massachusetts law requiring schools to notify parents of sex-education lessons. "There is no question in my mind that the law is being abused here," he said.

"I wouldn't be surprised if in the next couple of weeks there was some kind of (legal) action taken," he said.



One man remains critically injured with stab wounds suffered in an attack by a group of 10-15 apparent skinheads on a street in São Paolo, Brazil, that is a traditional meeting spot for young gays, lesbians, drag queens and punkers.

Police say the attack, which took place in the early morning hours of April 22, was unprovoked and probably motivated by bias, according to local media reports.

Jefferson Marcelo dos Reis Silva, 22, was stabbed serveral times and is still hospitalized after surgery, the newspaper O Estado reported. A 15-year-old male, punched in the face by the attackers, was treated and released, while two females, ages 14 and 15, were less seriously injured, the paper reported.

São Paolo city officials are taking heat for the attack, which came only two days after gay activists met with government representatives to complain about an increase in skinhead activity at that exact location. The April 19 meeting, called by São Paolo's GLBT Advisory Board, had drawn promises of a stronger police presence, according to press accounts at the time.

"It is unbelievable this is happening again in São Paolo in 2006," one activist said at the meeting, Mix Brasil reported. "I remember the case of Edson Néris, who was brutally beaten to death by skinheads in the city's Praça da República," an event that shook the city's large but politically docile gay population, the activist said.

Saturday's attack took place on a stretch of Rua da Consoloção, in São Paolo's well-heeled Jardins neighborhood, that most weekend evenings is a popular hangout for younger gays who cannot enter the street's several gay bars and who often express affection on the sidewalks in a public manner much less common among the city's older gays.