By Ann Rostow—
Seeing Was Believing
While preparing to write this column, I reviewed a collection of GLBT news items and stories, and I was particularly struck by a piece about the circulation of fake videos showing top athletes refusing to wear ribbons and generally expressing disdain for progressive viewpoints.
“Did your favorite sports star ‘shock fans’ or ‘shake’ the league by ‘publicly’ or ‘flatly’ refusing to wear an LGBT Rainbow Armband because it would turn the game ‘into a political circus?’” asks Alan Duke at Yahoo Sports. “The claim,” he continues, “was made about at least 95 football, soccer, basketball, baseball, and hockey players in posts published on dozens of fake Facebook fan pages aimed at American and European audiences, but produced from Vietnam.” Duke lists a hundred or so stars, from Carlos Alcaraz to Baker Mayfield, who have been targeted by so-called Viet Spam.
Chargers wide receiver Ladd McConkey is fake-quoted as saying: “I don’t care if the whole world calls me controversial. Forcing players to wear an LGBT armband turns football into a political circus. I play for the Chargers, for my team, and for the game—not for any movement.”
I’m particularly disturbed by fake videos these days due to a speech by Bill Clinton that Mel and I watched the day after Trump’s military strike on Caracas. It was about 15 or 20 minutes long, and, in it, Clinton discussed America’s history in Central America, the Constitutional requirements for military intervention, and the layered expertise that a president relies on from his or her national security advisors and staff. He drew on his experience in Bosnia and the care in which the U.S. employed force when he was in charge.
It was a pretty good speech, and I was particularly impressed that he delivered it so promptly, at a time when the cable news programs had barely grasped the situation. It looked as if he was in a lecture hall, so I guessed he had scheduled a previous speaking date and had reimagined his remarks on the fly.
Mel and I searched all over for the actual speech and the details of this lecture, which had popped up on a feed somewhere, somehow, the way they do these days. But it simply didn’t exist. The speech had referred directly to the removal of Maduro by our armed forces, so it wasn’t a dateline mix-up. And yet, my Google AI summary tells me to this this day: “Based on search results for January 2026, there are no records of a speech by former President Bill Clinton addressing the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro by the Trump administration.”
Where did this presentation come from, and why? It had no controversial content. And it was absolutely convincing. There was no tell-tale lag or glitch or whatever one imagines one might see on a fake video. We’re all familiar with Bill Clinton. It was him!
I’m seeing fake stuff everywhere now. I watched Coco Gauff beat Karolina Muchová in the Australian Open in a great three-set fourth round match. The two embraced at the net, and subsequently Muchová walked off to applause, waving at the crowd while Gauff clapped along. A little later I read a cray cray report about Muchová having a fit and throwing her racket at Coco as she stomped off the court. Say what?
Most commentators had seen the match and debunked the story, but where did it come from and why? Why do I encounter promos for new detective shows that don’t exist? I understand that nefarious groups would use fake news and videos to shape opinion, but why fabricate lectures and TV shows and confrontations on court? This week I saw that Gauff was caught on camera smashing her racket in a hallway after losing a quarterfinal match. I didn’t believe it until I followed up and I guess she did. But normally I wouldn’t feel obliged to verify such news.
And here’s why it really does disturb me. Like everyone, I’ve relied on the videos we’ve seen to illustrate beyond a doubt that the ICE agents who shot and killed Renée Goode and Alex Pretti were guilty of murder. But how easy it would be to redo such scenes to produce the opposite impression. Luckily, we had dozens of views in Minneapolis. But what about meetings behind closed doors? What about taped interviews? What about images of child sexual abuse created out of whole cloth? How are we to trust our eyes in the coming years? We can’t.
Wither the Pierian Spring?
On a related subject, I’ve never been a fan of AI-written news, but it seems to be sliding downhill into the rising tide of its own slop. It can be incoherent, pointless, lacking context, banal, and often inaccurate, and I’m starting to wonder whether AI programs are getting their raw material from other AI-generated content.
I just tried to read a story with the promising headline: “Man Admits to Drowning Wife in Hot Tub.” It was from the Thames Valley, and, even though it wasn’t a GLBT item, I thought we might take a little sidetrack if the details were intriguing enough. Brits behaving badly and all that.
But there were no details. Just weird mush. “The couple spent the evening away from home and came back expecting to relax,” wrote the bot, “but the night ended in tragedy.” I haven’t delved into the story, but murdering your wife isn’t “tragic”; it’s “cruel,” “heartless,” “violent,” “psychotic.” Is news writing, my lifelong métier, dying out at the hands of computerized compost? Because, as far as I can tell, nobody’s learning to write by themselves anymore, so what vast storehouse of thoughtful prose will AI programs rely on for their own consumption in the decades to come?
And did you read about the guys in China who are in trouble for photoshopping two male pandas getting it on in a Chengdu zoo? I’ve gone on too long on this subject, so I’ll leave the details for you to research.
Oh, and Chengdu is considered the gay capital of China, and nicknamed “Gaydu” by the community. Let’s go!
Palmetto Perv
Here’s what looked like a classic case of a smug, far-right, antigay politician exposed as a hypocrite for our communal disdain. I got tired of these jokers at some point and stopped salivating over the details. A lot of my “hypocrisy stories” involved homophobic people who were secretly gay—maybe even hiding it from themselves. There was humanity underneath those scenarios, even as we loved the gotcha satisfaction, and, at some point, I had enough of luxuriating in the embarrassment these poor jerks were experiencing. (Oh, you know I still liked it.)
But this guy? I don’t know how I missed him over the previous months, but South Carolina State Senator Robert John “RJ” May was accused of keeping and/or exchanging over 200 computer files of sex acts with toddlers and young children in 2024 under the screen name “joebidennnn69.” Honored in 2023 as legislator of the year by the South Carolina chapter of “Moms for Liberty,” the lawmaker was cochair of the state Freedom Caucus in 2024 until his grotesque alter-ego emerged into view.
Earlier this month, Mr. May, now 39, pled guilty and was sentenced to over 17 years in federal prison. I won’t even repeat the various anti-gay remarks this guy made during his time as scion of the SoCar Moms for Liberty. The comparison isn’t even worth it because I’ve read the nauseating fine print in the press release from the South Carolina U.S. Attorney’s Office and I’ll tell you: This guy isn’t a hypocrite; he’s a monster.
Monkey Business
Here’s a tedious article in The Washington Post titled: “The Evolutionary Upside of Same-Sex Sex Among Primates,” by veteran reporter Mark Johnson. This is not the first time we’ve taken a serious gander at the science behind our personal predilections. Indeed, the idea that there’s a physical, genetic, scientific explanation for being gay or lesbian has long been something of a holy grail to our community. How can you fault someone for being left-handed, for having grey eyes, for male-pattern baldness? You get the idea.
Now, a study published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution seems to have provided us with yet another set of vague theories about how gay sex might or might not contribute to, what? The coherence of the social structure? Who knows?
One of the study authors suggested young monkeys might use same-sex sex to practice for future mating. Really? Another tells us that one aim of the study was to show “how widespread” same-sex relations are in nature. We subsequently learn that “same-sex sexual behavior has been found in 261 mammal species, about 4 percent of the total.”
“Feeding, fighting, looking after your offspring, reproductive sex, and same-sex sexual behavior is a repertoire of behavior that makes these complex societies function,” said one of our boffins. It might just be me, but I’m not impressed with generalities that offer no new insight whatsoever. Hey, I love being a gay woman, but my sexual orientation is not right up there with “feeding, reproductive sex, and self-protection” on the list of things that make a complex society function. You can’t just drop “sexual orientation” into the mix and call it fundamental to success in some primate world—although it certainly does put the “fun” into how societies function.
An outside scientist then came along to praise the efforts of our original friends, who have long names that I haven’t included due to a combination of laziness and irritation:
“The idea is that mating behavior is costly in terms of time and energy, and then if you’re directing that behavior towards same-sex mates, you don’t have the potential for offspring. But the fact that that time and energy can go to building really strong alliances with same-sex individuals—that might allow you to compete better for food or even to defend a group of different-sex mates that you can then mate with,” observed our new commentator.
Um, maybe, maybe not, right? Our lead author now plans to investigate macaques and see how they might benefit from gay sex later in life. “That’s a big thing,” he said, “because it would definitely be a complete reversal of this Darwinian paradox to show that the more same-sex you do, the more babies you may have in the end.”
Where did the grant money come from for this project? Or perhaps the better question is: Where did it go? I have an image of several scientists in white coats living it up with a bunch of bonobos and a few bottles of bourbon.
“Our report is due next week!” one of them suddenly realizes.
“Just get ChatGPT to write it!” says another, while swinging upside down on a hanging rope ladder.
arostow@aol.com
GLBT Fortnight in Review
Published on January 29, 2026
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