Welcome back to another edition of Queerty's "Quick & Dirty" series. Join us as we recap the biggest stories of the week. There's no script. There's no filters. Just queer news, quick and dirty. This week, Queerty's Graham Gremore, Alex Reimer, Cameron Scheetz and Johnny Lopez dive headfirst diving headfirst into the latest Grindr chaos after a former employee spilled to Vox about exactly when things went from spicy to soggy.
"When I told the kids, I just felt like all that bullying, all that fear and all of that, I guess, abuse I went through as a kid, I was putting on to them," Appleton told Attwood. "As a parent, all you want to do is protect your kids. If someone hits your kids in the playground, you want to go find the f***** and kill them. You just say, 'Who was it?' You have that protective instinct to protect them from harm."
In July 2024, the 50-year-old came out as gay on Instagram, uploading a photo of himself and his partner Etienne Bousquet-Cassagne, 36, looking at a sunset. The pictured was captioned: "The most beautiful thing in life is when you have the right partner by your side with whom you can share everything." On Sunday (8 February), German outlet Bild reported that Schumacher and Bousquet-Cassagne are planning to tie the knot during a three-day event in Saint-Tropez this May.
I just replayed my whole life - 16 years of pain and struggling in the closet - and I just thought to myself, 'What is the big deal?' I didn't have any social media at the time, just my private Facebook which had my football boys on it and I thought, 'Do you know what - I am just going to make a wee post.' Then I fell asleep, when I woke up it was an explosion of notifications, all the media outlets picked it up.
He spent his teenage years, he said, trying to reconcile his sexuality with those expectations. "As a young teenager, I carried a weight that did not seem to fit into that world, and I lived in a constant state of dichotomy. I loved the game, but I lived with a persistent fear. I wondered how I could be gay and still play such a tough and masculine sport."
In this episode: coming out. Academia can think of itself as an area that can ask the difficult questions. Science, after all, is all about getting to the bottom of things, seeking an understanding of the world around us in all its complexity. But when it comes to the complexity of researchers themselves, academia can often struggle to have the tough conversations.
"Nonna was just trying to figure it out," Grande told Poehler. She was "very accepting, very loving, very celebratory. But she was just trying to figure it out. Because she couldn't believe it. You know, in her mind, he had plenty of girlfriends." "So, she goes, 'Frankie, have you seen a pair of breasts?'" Grande continued, imitating her grandmother's Brooklyn accent. "And he was like, 'Yeah. Yeah, Nonna, I've seen breasts, yeah.' And she goes, 'Didn't do anything for you?' He was like, 'No, Nonna. No.' And she's like, 'Well, you're gay.'"
Many of us idealize a day in which no one needs to "come out," when wherever someone falls on the gender or sexuality spectrum is accepted and embraced. Sadly, today is not that day - the world can be cruel (and often is) to anyone who doesn't fit into the heteronormative bubble. But if you're here, it probably means the last thing you want to do is contribute to the mental and emotional toll put on LGBTQ young people.
DEAR ABBY: My longtime friend let's call her Cindy is six months pregnant and has started sharing name ideas with me. Cindy will hear a word she thinks sounds pretty and decide it will make a great name for her daughter, regardless of the meaning of the word. I had to beg her to stop considering Chlamydia as a name. She finally agreed after I repeatedly emphasized the bullying her daughter could receive over that name.
I'm pretty close with him. I call him every couple of weeks. Usually we have a phone conversation and he asks how New York is, or school, or wherever we are. And in every single conversation he's like, "Do you have a boyfriend? Do you have a boyfriend yet? Where's your boyfriend?"
Earlier this year, IAC Chairman Barry Diller came out as gay in his memoir, Who Knew. Now, is he the first big, fancy businessman to be gay? Certainly not. But because Diller has been married to Diane von Fürstenberg since 2001, the admission generated a fair amount of discourse and made some people (read: me) very jealous. It all started in May, when New York magazine published a touching essay by Diller titled: "Barry & Diane: The truth about us, after all these years."
My home used to be a carefully curated museum of a life I wasn't actually living. The clothes I wore were a uniform, the decor was a decoy, and the entire space felt like a stage set for a character I was exhausted from playing. Coming out of the closet was the curtain call. The most tangible, cathartic part of the process was the great purge that followed - dismantling that set piece by piece.
You may have seen my TEDx talk. If so, you know its premise is having the courage to take a leap. My first story was about the first time I jumped off a high dive at the swimming pool. The second story was the leap of coming out. Both of those were scary. Did they prepare me for leaping out of plane 14,500 feet in the air? Not so much. You can't die from the first two.
Over the past little while, there have been people online trying to define me, twist things, and share conversations in ways that feel harmful. Instead of letting others write my story, I want to share it in my own words. The truth is, over the past few years, I've come to understand and accept that I'm gay. It's taken me a long time to really process this part of myself and even longer to feel comfortable enough to say it out loud.
