News Tuesday: Sex, The Sun and and some STDs

Lesbian and bisexual women are often overlooked when it comes to sex surveys and scientific studies into sexual attitudes, and stories like this story in The Sun don't do much to help things.

According to the trashy tabloid, University College London medics found lesbians had quadruple the chance of catching STIs and one in 10 women under 25 has had Chlamydia, a cause of infertility. But, as most women will admit, one fumble does not a lesbian make and the Sun's report skimmed over the difference between lesbians and women who had an experience with another women.

Indeed, when DIVA rang her, Dr Cath Mercer was keen to reassure us that lesbians are not at higher risk of infection with STIs.

Flirty Thursday: Trans dating

Transgender and transexual daters have often been sidelined when it comes to internet dating. Not for much longer - Trans Passions is just one of the slowly growing wave of trans focused online dating services.

WWWeird Wednesday: Laugh it up

As US comic Sarah Silverman said in a sketch where she played it gay, 'as a lesbian I resent your laughter. And all laughter'. It's true that gay girls have got a bad rap in the humour stakes. But now lesbians are being offered workshops on how to be funny as 'reported' on Fake Gay News.

News Tuesday: Girl, 17, stoned to death in Iraq

A teenager has lost her life in a brutal and horrific 'honour killing' in the village of Bahzan in northern Iraq. Seventeen-year old Du’a Khalil Aswad was stoned to death by villagers and male relatives following rumours of a relationship with a young Muslim boy.Amnesty International condemn the killing and the subsequent reprisals.

Movie Monday: Rap it up

The bling bling, thugged out world of hip hop seems like an unlikely birthplace for the next generation of gay rights activists, but US rapper Melange Lavonne is using some pretty impressive wordplay to get through to young rap fans

Catch her first ever music video for her new song 'Gay Bash' here:

Flirty Thursday: Something Sapphic on the side, madam?

We may all like to think of ourselves as thoroughly modern and sophisticated when it comes to the dating scene, but dating sites like the US-based Philanderers.com and British Illicit Encounters.com make you ponder the whole thing a bit

Here, married women can advertise for lesbians who’re looking to be the other woman, and gay women eager to canoodle with married women can get in touch. Far be it for me to moralise, but it all seems a tad mechanical.

WWWeird Wednesday: Skinny lesbians? Fat Chance

I love it when science gives me an excuse to eat ice cream. According to the Australian Daily Telegraph it doesn't matter what we shovel down our gobs, because chances are we'll end up overweight anyway.

Lesbians are twice as likely as heterosexual women to be overweight or obese, says a report published in the American Journal of Public Health, one of the first large studies to look at obesity among lesbians. But the good news? “The results of these studies indicate that lesbian women have a better body image than do heterosexual women,” researchers wrote. So go on, have another piece of cake.

News Tuesday: Uncle Sam Doesn't Need You!

Over in the US, the 'Don't ask, don't tell' policy for homosexual men and women in the miltary has been taken quite literally by the government, according to the Centre for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military (CSSM).

They point out that despite the fact that the military desperately needs translators, the US military has discharged 'at least 322 service members with skills in Arabic, Farsi, Korean and other critical languages over the last 10 years because of the ban on homosexuals in the armed forces'.

What's more, the Government Accountability Office says the cost of recruiting and training personnel to replace all 9,488 service members separated under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy would be at least $190 million, if each was replaced one for one with a new trained recruit. The total does not include costs for the Marine Corps, Coast Guard or the reserve components.

So a big salute for Democrat Representative Gary Ackerman (in the vid below), who slammed the U.S. military’s ban on gay servicemembers at the State Department’s 2008 budget hearing. In an hilarious tongue-in-cheek speech, Ackerman wondered why the Pentagon “seems more afraid of gay people than they are [of] terrorists,” and that if the terrorists were smart, “they’d get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad.” Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State, could only reply meekly that she would look into the situation.