They Attacked Him With Gay Slurs. He Responded By Coming Out.

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They Attacked Him With Gay Slurs. He Responded By Coming Out.

Mitja Zubin arrived at the European Athletics Championships hoping people would notice how fast he could run.

Instead, some people decided to talk about whether he was gay.

The 20-year-old Slovenian hurdler was making his European Championships debut in Birmingham after recently achieving a major milestone in his young career.

On July 1, he ran the 400-meter hurdles in 49.85 seconds, breaking the 50-second barrier for the first time.

But after an enthusiastic post-race interview with the Slovenian Athletics Federation was shared on social media, the comments quickly became ugly.

There were insults about his appearance.

There were homophobic slurs.

And Mitja decided not to quietly scroll past them.

He Showed People The Hate

Mitja shared a screenshot of some of the abusive comments on his Instagram Story.

He described them as a small example of the online toxicity athletes can experience behind the scenes.

“I didn’t realize how much hatred there was at home,” he wrote.

Then something rather remarkable happened.

Instead of Mitja being left to deal with the abuse alone, Slovenian athletics publicly stood behind him.

The Slovenian Athletics Federation condemned comments attacking personal characteristics or insinuating about someone’s sexual orientation as offensive and unacceptable.

Then support came from somewhere even more prominent.

The President Of Slovenia Spoke Up

Slovenian President Nataša Pirc Musar addressed Mitja directly in a public statement.

She told him that the support of the vast majority of people was louder than those trying to insult and humiliate him.

“There is no place for homophobia, hate speech and discrimination in sports in our society,” she wrote.

And amid the national conversation that followed, Mitja decided to say publicly something that the people closest to him had known for years.

He is gay.

“Maybe Someone Younger Won’t Be Ashamed”

Mitja told Outsports that this was the first time he had publicly spoken about his sexual orientation.

It wasn’t his first coming out.

He had told his mother, younger brother and close friends when he was 16.

“I never felt the need to broadcast it to the world,” he explained.

But being confronted with homophobia gave him a reason to do something different.

“I came out so that maybe someone who comes after me, someone younger, won’t be ashamed of it,” he told Slovenian sports newspaper Ekipa.

That motivation has become central to how Mitja now talks about what happened.

He wants younger gay athletes to have something he understands can make an enormous difference: somebody visible ahead of them.

“Growing up, having a visible role model can make all the difference,” he told Outsports.

He wants young athletes struggling with who they are to understand that they are not alone — and that being themselves does not place a ceiling on what they can achieve.

He’s Just Getting Started

That last part matters because Mitja is not looking back on a finished athletics career.

He is 20.

His 49.85 personal best in the 400m hurdles came only last month.

He represents Slovenia internationally and is among the country’s promising young athletes.

His ambitions now include reaching the World Championships.

And perhaps one day, the Olympics.

He was surprised to learn from Outsports that he had been the only publicly out gay athlete competing in the men’s category at these European Championships.

Rather than making him uncomfortable, the distinction gave him pride.

“Representation matters deeply because everyone should feel safe, welcome, and valued for their athletic abilities,” he said.

And ultimately, athletic ability is exactly what Mitja wants people to judge.

“I want my results to speak for themselves,” he told Outsports.

“Being gay is just one small piece of who I am — it doesn’t define my entire identity or my limits as an athlete.”

The people posting gay slurs beneath Mitja Zubin’s interview apparently thought his sexuality was something they could use against him.

Instead, they gave a talented 20-year-old athlete a reason to tell younger gay people something much more powerful.

You can be gay.

You can be yourself.

And you can still dream about standing on the biggest sporting stage in the world.

📷 @mitjazubin

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What Happens to Bear Culture When Everyone’s on Ozempic?

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What Happens to Bear Culture When Everyone’s on Ozempic?

The bears aren’t disappearing.

But apparently they’re ordering smaller T-shirts.

That was one of the more fascinating details to emerge from a recent Advocate look at how GLP-1 weight-loss medications are affecting gay bear culture.

Frank Mahoney, president of the Provincetown Bears, said registrations for this summer’s Bear Week were running ahead of the previous year.

So much for the extinction of the bear.

But organizers had noticed something else.

Where larger T-shirt sizes once dominated orders, more attendees were requesting small, medium and large.

It’s a wonderfully mundane detail that hints at a much bigger cultural question.

What happens to bear culture when the bears start losing weight?

More Than A Body Type

Bear culture emerged within gay male culture in the 1980s, partly as an alternative to beauty standards that often privileged youth, thinness and carefully sculpted bodies.

Academic research into bear identity has found that bigger and hairier bodies became not merely accepted within the community, but desirable.

For some men, discovering bear culture meant discovering that characteristics they had been taught to dislike about themselves could actually make them attractive.

That can be enormously powerful.

But it also helps explain why Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, Zepbound and similar medications have created such an interesting conversation.

Some bear-identified men are now losing substantial amounts of weight.

Some use these medications to treat diabetes or other medical conditions.

Some want to lose weight for other health reasons.

And some simply want a different body.

None of those men should have to justify that decision to the rest of us.

Can You Lose The Belly And Keep The Bear?

Richard Jones of Bear World Magazine has lost weight while using Mounjaro to manage type 2 diabetes.

He still considers himself a bear.

And perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising.

Bear culture has never had an official weigh-in.

Its sprawling vocabulary alone — bears, cubs, otters, muscle bears, polar bears and plenty more — suggests a community that has always contained different bodies.

Research has also described bear identity as involving belonging, masculinity, maturity and self-acceptance rather than simply physical measurements.

A man’s body can change enormously between 30 and 60 without his friends, relationships or sense of community disappearing with his waistline.

So why should losing weight automatically revoke his bear card?

But What About The Chasers?

There is, naturally, another constituency in this debate.

The men who really, really like bears. 🐻❤️

If bigger bodies are genuinely part of what attracts you to someone, watching those bodies shrink may produce some complicated feelings.

Hence the jokes about Ozempic making the bears disappear.

But there is an important line between attraction and ownership.

Nobody owes a boyfriend, a hookup, a dating app or an entire gay subculture a particular body.

A man choosing to lose weight isn’t betraying people who find larger men attractive.

Equally, a man choosing not to lose weight shouldn’t be treated as somebody waiting to be “fixed.”

That may be where this supposedly silly question becomes genuinely interesting.

Body Acceptance Has To Work Both Ways

Bear culture’s most valuable contribution may never have been convincing gay men that bigger bodies were better.

It was showing many men that bigger bodies could be attractive at all.

That distinction matters.

Body acceptance stops being acceptance if it requires somebody to preserve the same body forever.

And bear culture itself has never been as simple as fat men with beards.

Not every bear is large.

Not every large gay man identifies as a bear.

Not every bear is hairy.

And the community has never been completely free from its own arguments about who is bearish enough to belong.

GLP-1 medications haven’t created those questions.

They’ve simply given the community a new reason to ask them.

So Where Are All The Bears Going?

Judging from Provincetown, nowhere.

They’re still going to Bear Week.

They’re still finding one another.

They’re still building friendships, having sex, falling in love, dancing, partying and creating community.

Some of them may simply be doing it in smaller T-shirts.

And perhaps that tells us something important about what bear culture became after decades of existence.

It may have started partly around bodies that mainstream gay culture failed to appreciate.

But somewhere along the way, it became bigger than those bodies.

Maybe GLP-1s aren’t killing bear culture at all.

Maybe they’re revealing what was underneath the belly all along.

A community.

📷 @ptownbears

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They Wanted To Become Dads. The Law Said They Were The Wrong Kind Of Couple.

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They Wanted To Become Dads. The Law Said They Were The Wrong Kind Of Couple.

Trent and Brad Dunn wanted to become dads.

They had a surrogate willing to help them create their family.

They were prepared to go through the demanding process required to make that happen.

But there was one requirement the married Australian couple could never satisfy.

They were two men.

Now, after a legal battle stretching over three years, Trent and Brad have become the first same-sex couple to receive approval for a surrogacy arrangement from Western Australia’s Reproductive Technology Council.

And they can finally concentrate on what they wanted in the first place.

Trying to become parents.

“The Fact That We Were Two Men”

Western Australia’s existing Surrogacy Act dates from 2008.

Under the law, a couple eligible for a parentage order was defined as two people of opposite sexes who were married or in a de facto relationship and unable to conceive a child.

Single women could also qualify under certain circumstances.

Male same-sex couples and single men could not.

For Trent and Brad, that meant their path to parenthood effectively stopped before it could begin.

Brad told WAtoday that the couple met every criterion except one: “the fact that we were two men.”

So rather than simply accepting that answer, they challenged it.

A Three-Year Fight

The Dunns argued that Western Australia’s restrictions discriminated against them because of their sex and conflicted with federal anti-discrimination protections.

In May 2026, Western Australia’s Court of Appeal agreed.

The court found that relevant provisions of the state’s Surrogacy Act were inconsistent with federal law and therefore invalid to the extent of that inconsistency.

That decision opened a door that had previously been closed to the couple.

Now the Reproductive Technology Council has approved their surrogacy arrangement.

According to WAtoday, they are the first same-sex couple to receive that approval in Western Australia.

The Law Was Already Changing — Just Not Fast Enough

There is an unusual twist to Trent and Brad’s story.

Western Australia has already decided that its old restrictions need to go.

The state parliament passed sweeping new assisted reproductive technology and surrogacy legislation in December 2025.

When it comes into effect, access will no longer depend on a person’s sex, relationship status, gender identity, sex characteristics or sexual orientation.

Same-sex couples and single men will explicitly be able to access assisted reproductive treatments including surrogacy.

But implementation is not expected until mid-2027.

For couples who have already spent years waiting to start a family, another year can feel very long indeed.

“This has been a really long journey for us and for our family,” Brad told WAtoday.

He described repeatedly being told to wait and be patient while knowing that the obstacle was not their suitability to become parents.

It was their sex.

Now They Can Focus On Becoming Dads

Trent and Brad have now begun treatment with their surrogate, her wife and a separate egg donor.

They know there are no guarantees.

Surrogacy and fertility treatment can bring plenty of challenges even after the legal barriers disappear.

But those are finally the challenges the couple want to be thinking about.

“We know plenty of challenges still lie ahead of us,” Brad said, “but we are overjoyed to be focused now on the wonderful opportunity of parenthood.”

And after fighting their own case, they are trying to make the road easier for the families who come next.

The couple have created a template document based on their arrangement that others may be able to use.

For Brad, helping another couple avoid the same experience would give meaning to what they went through.

“If it means that someone doesn’t have to experience that same pain… then this has been worth it,” he said.

Three years ago, Trent and Brad were fighting a law that told them the kind of couple they were made them ineligible to take the next step toward becoming parents.

Today, the law is changing, their case has opened a door early, and treatment has begun.

They still don’t know exactly where the journey will end.

But at last, the biggest question facing them isn’t whether two men should be allowed to become dads.

It’s whether their dream of becoming dads is about to come true.

📷 Trent and Brad Dunn on change.org

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Neil Patrick Harris Reveals What Really Pushed Him To Come Out As Gay

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Neil Patrick Harris Reveals What Really Pushed Him To Come Out As Gay

Neil Patrick Harris remembers preparing himself for the possibility that publicly coming out as gay could make for a very bad week.

Instead, almost everyone seemed remarkably unsurprised.

Nearly 20 years later, Harris can laugh about that.

“I was a little bit offended that more people weren’t surprised,” he joked in a new interview.

The actor has opened up about his 2006 coming out during an appearance on Jamie Laing’s Great Company podcast.

Harris was already famous from his childhood role in Doogie Howser, M.D. and had recently begun playing Barney Stinson on How I Met Your Mother.

Barney was famously written as an almost absurdly enthusiastic womanizer.

Harris’ private life looked rather different.

He had already begun dating actor and chef David Burtka before auditioning for the sitcom.

The people working on How I Met Your Mother knew Harris and Burtka were a couple.

The wider public did not.

Harris recalled the peculiar compromises that required.

The two men could attend movie premieres together, but Harris would walk the red carpet while Burtka avoided the photographers.

They could tell themselves that they were simply keeping their relationship private.

Both men had careers, after all, and neither was obligated to make their personal life part of a publicity campaign.

But Harris now recognizes another consequence.

While he received the public treatment afforded to a celebrity, Burtka effectively had to disappear.

Harris said that arrangement risked making the man he loved feel “less than.”

It was also becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.

This was the mid-2000s, when celebrity gossip blogs had enormous influence and speculation about supposedly closeted gay actors had become its own form of online entertainment.

Harris remembers reading posts inviting audiences to guess which famous actor might secretly be gay.

He worried he could become the next target.

Eventually, the speculation moved directly toward him.

A journalist asked one of Harris’ publicists about his sexuality.

According to Harris, the publicist responded that he was “not of that persuasion.”

Harris had not personally made that denial.

But once the remark was publicly attributed to his camp, it created a new problem.

People who knew Harris was gay began questioning why he appeared to be denying it.

At that point, Harris says he could see what was likely to happen next.

He feared gossip outlets would begin actively soliciting people who had dated or slept with him.

Instead of waiting for that story to develop around him, he decided to take control of it.

“I’ve gotta get ahead of the story,” he remembers thinking.

Harris worked with his agent and publicist on a statement that he felt accurately represented him.

On November 3, 2006, People published it.

Harris described himself as “a very content gay man” living his life to the fullest.

Today, a major television star publicly acknowledging that he is gay may not sound particularly extraordinary.

In 2006, the calculation could feel considerably different.

Harris was playing a major role on a successful network sitcom.

He had spent much of his life working in an entertainment industry where openly gay actors still faced questions about whether audiences would accept them as romantic leads.

And public hostility toward gay people remained highly visible.

Harris remembered thinking about anti-gay protesters who placed hateful signs outside people’s homes.

He knew there was at least a possibility that his announcement could turn ugly.

Instead, relatively little happened.

“There was indifference at best,” Harris recalled.

That left him with an unexpectedly comic complaint.

He had anticipated at least some shocked reaction.

Perhaps people would ask how someone as seemingly masculine as Neil Patrick Harris could possibly be gay.

They did not.

Harris joked that he was almost offended by how unsurprised everybody appeared to be.

Behind the joke, however, he recognizes why his experience was easier than it might have been for actors who came out before him.

Those people had already absorbed much of the punishment.

Each visible gay actor had made the next announcement slightly less extraordinary.

Harris believes their experiences helped create the relatively muted response he received.

His own coming out would subsequently contribute to that same process for actors following him.

Harris went on to become one of American television’s most visible openly gay stars.

He remained on How I Met Your Mother through its nine-season run and won multiple Emmy Awards during his career.

He also hosted the Tony Awards, Emmy Awards and Academy Awards.

Meanwhile, the private relationship he once tried to keep away from photographers became very public.

Harris and Burtka became parents to twins Gideon and Harper in 2010.

They married in 2014.

The couple have now been together for more than two decades.

Harris’ new recollection also serves as a reminder of how recently outing was treated as entertainment.

Celebrity blogger Perez Hilton was among the figures who publicly speculated about Harris’ sexuality during that period and encouraged readers to provide information about closeted celebrities.

Hilton has since said he regrets those tactics and has described his past efforts to out gay celebrities as cruel.

He has also said that he later apologized to Harris.

Harris did not center Hilton by name in his new interview.

Instead, he described the broader gossip culture that made him feel increasingly certain that someone else would tell his story if he did not tell it first.

That makes the phrase “forced to come out” slightly more complicated than it initially sounds.

No one physically compelled Harris to issue his statement.

But the possibility of retaining genuine control over whether his sexuality became public was rapidly disappearing.

He chose to speak before the decision was effectively made for him.

Today, Harris sees enormous progress.

He pointed to a culture in which LGBTQ+ actors and same-sex relationships are increasingly visible across mainstream entertainment.

There is still pressure surrounding coming out, particularly for young public figures.

But the consequences Harris feared in 2006 no longer feel inevitable in quite the same way.

And perhaps the funniest detail in his story is also the most hopeful.

Neil Patrick Harris spent days worrying that America might discover he was gay.

America’s response was essentially:

Yes, Neil.

We know.

📷 @nph

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Igby Rigney On Playing Bret Easton Ellis’ Secret Gay Double Life In The Shards

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Igby Rigney On Playing Bret Easton Ellis’ Secret Gay Double Life In The Shards

Four episodes into The Shards, Igby Rigney’s performance is becoming one of the most interesting parts of Ryan Murphy’s new psychological thriller.

Rigney plays a fictionalized 17-year-old version of author Bret Easton Ellis in Los Angeles in 1981.

Bret has a girlfriend, secretly has sex with boys and spends much of his life performing a version of heterosexuality for the people around him.

That tension between public and private identity is central to both Bret Easton Ellis’ original novel and the FX adaptation.

It also became central to the way Rigney physically plays the character.

The Guardian observed that Bret appears almost like two different people depending on whether he is interacting romantically with women or men.

With his girlfriend Debbie, Bret often appears stiff and guarded.

During his encounters with boys, his posture and physical energy shift noticeably.

Rigney joked that the difference did not require much explicit direction.

“That was all natural, baby,” he said.

The result is a surprisingly effective portrayal of closeting without requiring Bret to constantly explain what he is feeling.

The audience can see the effort involved in maintaining the straight version of himself.

Then it can see what happens when that effort temporarily disappears.

The show is set during Bret’s senior year at an elite Los Angeles private school.

His comfortable but increasingly unstable world is disrupted by the arrival of Robert Mallory, a mysterious new student played by Homer Gere.

Bret becomes intensely suspicious of Robert at the same time that a serial killer known as the Trawler is targeting young people across the city.

Whether Bret’s obsession with Robert is driven by fear, attraction, jealousy or some combination of all three remains deliberately ambiguous.

Sexuality is therefore not simply an additional storyline attached to the thriller.

It shapes how Bret interprets almost everything happening around him.

His secret encounters with men coexist with his relationship with Debbie and with the carefully maintained social identity expected of a wealthy teenage boy in 1981.

Ryan Murphy has said the period carries particular emotional significance for him personally.

Murphy was a teenager in 1981 and has described it as a moment when sexual freedom suddenly became connected with fear as the first reports of AIDS began appearing.

He has even wondered publicly whether the Trawler can be interpreted partly as a metaphor for the threat that would soon transform gay life.

Ellis, characteristically, has declined to give a definitive answer.

Rigney faced another unusual challenge: playing a living and extremely recognizable writer without actually meeting him.

The actor has said he never met Bret Easton Ellis during production.

Instead, Ryan Murphy became one of his primary guides in developing the character.

Rigney also spent considerable time working on Bret’s voiceover.

Ellis originally narrated the audiobook version of The Shards himself, making his distinctive delivery particularly familiar to readers.

Rigney and Murphy worked extensively in post-production to find something that respected that voice without simply turning the performance into an imitation.

The intimate scenes presented a different kind of challenge.

Rigney has said the sex scenes were not the part of the role that worried him most.

He compared filming intimacy to performing a dance.

Once boundaries, movement and choreography have been established, the actors know what they are doing and can concentrate on the emotional purpose of the scene.

The more disturbing psychological material was harder.

That includes Bret’s increasingly paranoid state and scenes involving powerful adults who exploit the vulnerabilities of the teenagers around them.

The series has already begun diverging from Ellis’ novel in significant ways.

Murphy has expanded characters and events that existed only briefly in the book and has shown parts of the serial-killer storyline that the novel kept outside Bret’s immediate perspective.

Some sexual relationships have also been altered or expanded.

Yet the basic emotional engine remains recognizably queer.

Bret is simultaneously trying to solve the mystery surrounding Robert and trying to understand his own desire.

He is watching other people for evidence of secrets while concealing one of the biggest secrets in his own life.

That contradiction makes his status as an unreliable narrator particularly compelling.

If Bret cannot comfortably acknowledge the truth about himself, viewers have reason to question how accurately he understands anyone else.

Rigney brings that uncertainty into the performance through surprisingly small choices.

A change in posture can reveal more than dialogue.

A flirtation can suddenly expose a version of Bret that his friends rarely see.

A moment of attraction can collide immediately with fear.

For queer viewers, that physical code-switching may be one of the most recognizable elements of the entire show.

Many gay men who grew up closeted remember consciously or unconsciously changing the way they spoke, moved or reacted depending on who was around them.

The Shards places that experience inside a much larger world of wealth, violence, drugs and paranoia.

But beneath all the Ryan Murphy gloss and Bret Easton Ellis darkness is something comparatively simple.

A teenage boy is trying to understand who he is while making sure everyone around him sees something else.

Igby Rigney makes both versions visible.

📷 FX / @igby\.rigney

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