WHO WERE OUT MAGAZINE'S WORST PEOPLE OF 2005?

Now that I finished reading the 4 issues of THE ONION that arrived while I was away, I'm going through all the other magazines that came while I was in Morocco. This morning at breakfast I flipped through the year end issue of OUT, their annual "OUT 100" issue in which they recognize the achievements of the 100 people who made the most noteworthy contributions to the gay community. I have to admit that I didn't recognize many of the names-- except Gregg Araki (who once used me in a movie before he was famous), John Aravosis (one of my favorite crusading bloggers), Bret Easton Ellis, Gilbert and George (who did some album art for Erasure when I was running Reprise Records), and all the music people. But they have two other sections-- straight allies (like Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Shaq and Kanye West) and, finally, their annual "Hall of Shame."

With one exception (author Terry McMillan), I sure knew all the names in this part of the magazine. And you probably do too: Jeff Gannon (the right-wing male prostitute who was plying his trade at White House sleep-overs and shilling for the Bush Regime in bogus press conferences under the GOP name "James Guckert"), Pope Benedict XVI (an ultra right-wing "German who wants to make one group of people a scapegoat, accusing them on being an evil influence"), the "Reverend" Fred Phelps (a perfect of exemplar of the new Bush brand of state-backed religion), Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert Traynham (Santorum's pet gay boy), and Tom Coburn (the most far right loon ever elected to the United States Senate, who calls gays the "greatest threat to our freedom that we face today," presumably even more of a threat than the like-minded right-wing kooks who blew up the Federal Building in OK City in 1995 along with 168 of Coburn's constituents). This is probably as good a place as any for me to bring up that observers of the Scalito hearings on TV have been noticing that Coburn is not just an extremist but also completely insane, tearing up and crying like a 7 year old girl at odd moments and for no apparent reason. I'm sure OUT would have mentioned this if it had happened while they were deliberating their 2005 choices.