Q Toon: Olympians, Out or Not

The list of out athletes competing at the Tokyo Olympics keeps growing. The first article I read about them knew of 168; by last weekend, the number was up to 180. (Some athletes who were out to their friends and families had never had a reason to come out to the rest of the world before the games.) Outsports, the authority on such things, knew of only 56 out athletes at the 2016 Rio games, and 23 at the 2012 London Olympics.

A nosy reporter drew condemnation during the Rio games by writing a racy story about tracking down LGBTQ athletes on Grindr, heedless of their outness or the safety of being out in their home countries. He didn't include their names in his story for Daily Beast, but wrote enough details about the athletes that others could identify some of them. Accordingly, any resemblance between the people in panels 2 and 3 of this week's cartoon and any persons living or dead is, as the legal saying goes, purely coincidental.

And to anyone left out of panel 1, my apologies for not managing to squeeze all 180+ of you in there.

______________

Update: Someone has been at it again, outing Olympic athletes without their permission.

[Insider] discovered at least 10 Twitter posts and four TikTok videos, one of which was seen over 140,000 times and revealed 30 users’ full faces before the platforms removed them for violating community guidelines.

At least one male user reportedly signaled on his profile that he was from a country known for discriminating against LGBTQ people. (The posts have since been removed and could not be verified by Yahoo Life.)

Grindr later issued a statement condemning those who created the videos, acknowledging that they breached the app’s terms and conditions, which “prohibit them from publicly displaying, publishing, or otherwise distributing any content or information that are part of the Grindr services.”

That’s especially important at this year’s Games, as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is hosting 11 nations where being LGBTQ is criminalized, according to Human Dignity Trust: Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Pakistan.

In some of those countries, being LGBTQ is punishable by death.

Q Toon: Rio Grindr

Although none of them represent the United States, there have been a record number of out LGBT athletes at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janiero — 49 by Cyd Ziegler's count on Outsports. I've seen some complaints that these athletes aren't getting American media attention, even when they've celebrated finishing an event by proposing to their significant others; the American media's concentration on American athletes accounts for some of this.

Enter, on the other hand, Daily Beast London editor Nico Hines, a straight reporter who posted a profile on the gay hook-up app Grindr to see what athletes were looking for gay sex in Rio. Hines then posted an exposé on the site, headlined  "I Got Three Grindr Dates in an Hour in the Olympic Village."

What the straight guy didn't realize was what a terrible idea it was to publicly share key identifiers that would help people identify who these athletes were and possibly lead to a mass outing. It would be bad enough if they were all divers from Western Europe. But Hines didn't stop there, admitting in the piece that at least one was from a homophobic country. And he didn't stop there, he even identified the sport the athlete was in!

The consequences for that athlete could easily exceed embarrassment. Several countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and Islam actively persecute LGBT citizens and visitors. Worse, in some of these countries, there is no legal consequence for murdering a gay or lesbian family member.

Hines himself acknowledged in the article that some athletes remain closeted in their "notoriously homophobic" home countries. To its credit, The Daily Beast made an effort after receiving complaints to scrub identifying details from the article, then removed it entirely and sent Hines home to his wife and children.

Q Toon: Terms of Service

Since I had to send this week's cartoon to the syndicate Monday morning, it is not about the results of Tuesday's elections.

Q Syndicate✒Nov 6, 2014

At this point, you may be anxious to discuss something else, anyway.

You may recall that, back in June, CNBC squawking head Simon Hobbs had an awkward moment on his TV show when he mistakenly assumed the fact that Apple CEO Tim Cook is gay was common knowledge. (My blog entry on that is here.) Mr. Cook has decided to let Mr. Hobbs off the hook, whereupon Mr. Hobbs has probably added his outing of Mr. Cook to his list of successful market forecasts.

Meanwhile, this leaves the ladies from my Million Moms cartoons puzzling whether to okay the latest iTunes update.

Q Toon: Simon Says

CNBC's "Squawk Box" was discussing the lack of any openly gay CEO's among the Fortune 500 when co-host Simon Hobbs stunned his fellow panelists by offering, "“I think Tim Cook is fairly open about the fact he’s gay at the head of Apple, isn’t he?”

After an awkward silence, James B. Stewart (on the show to discuss his book on the topic) answered, "Um. No."

Mr. Cook has given generously to and advocated for LGBT causes, runs a gay-friendly company, and last week again marched with his employees at San Francisco's Pride parade. But he has not discussed his personal life in public, nor has he been publicly linked to anyone romantically.

Which isn't stopping me from having a little fun with the story.

Have a happy Fourth o' July everyone!

Q Toon: Who's Your Sweet Babeu?

This has been a story made for cable news, but of less interest to print media -- outside of Phoenix New Times, which broke the story in the first place. Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu was thrust out of the closet after a relationship went sour. His ex, a Mexican immigrant named Jose Orozco, suspected that Babeu was trolling the internet for sex, and stung him by arranging a rendez-vous under a fake identity on line.

(Originally, I wasn't going to include the boyfriend's name in this cartoon, but decided that the name Jose helped clarify that I wasn't trying to gloss over his being, say, Swedish. In the last couple days, however, Orozco's full name and photo have been made public on line and on television, so I will not keep referring to him as "the boyfriend" here. I should also explain that I use the word "illegal" in the cartoon instead of "undocumented" on the assumption that Babeu would favor such terminology.)

Babeu has denied the accusation that he threatened to expose that Orozco was in the U.S. illegally if he ever went public with their relationship. Babeu has, however, come out of the closet as a gay man as a result of the story, which he says is a relief to him.

We'll have to see how this affects his candidacy to represent Arizona's fourth district in Congress. He may be hurt less for the revelation that he's gay (this was once Jim Kolbe's district, after all) than by the incongruity of his relationship with Jose with his record as a hardliner against illegal immigration. Babeu first came to national attention four years ago as the sheriff walking beside John McCain in the "Build the Dang Fence" ad:

It isn't just the sexual relationship that conflicts with Babeu's record on immigration: he also employed Orozco to create and maintain his internet presence (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). If you need a moment to let that sink in, here it is again: the guy who went on national TV to decry undocumented immigrants in this country was simultaneously employing a guy he knew to be an undocumented immigrant to work for him.

Giving Orozco that job may have been what ultimately came back to bite Babeu in the ass: Orozco became suspicious of Babeu once he found the sheriff's accounts on gay dating sites Adam4Adam and Chino Valley E-news.

Buried deep in the New Times story is a development that may embarrass openly gay Democratic congressional candidate Matt Heinz. After Heinz broke with his party in the Arizona legislature to vote to allocate $5 million to combat border violence in Pinal County -- which is 70 miles away from the Mexican border -- one of Babeu's text messages that Orozco released reports that Babeu planned to spend the night with Heinz and his partner. (Note: The allocation was reduced to $1.7 million in the final bill.) Perhaps after a night of clubbing with the Heinzes, Babeu was simply being prudent by not driving home; but the implication of something further could doom both of their campaigns to succeed Gabby Giffords in Congress.

Mission Implausible

Last week, William Gheen, a South Carolina Democrat (yes, a Democrat — the political spectrum is S.C. skews to the right compared to most of the country) now active in the Tea Party movement told his fellow teabaggers that Senator Lindsey Graham was being blackmailed to support Democrats' version of Immigration Reform:

"Sen. Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality. Come out of that closet, Lindsey. Come out of that log cabin closet...Look, I'm a tolerant person. I don't care about your private life, Lindsey. But as our U.S. Senator, I need to figure out why you're trying to sell out your own countrymen, and I need to make sure your being gay isn't it."

What connection there is between being a closeted gay and supporting immigration reform is beyond me. If Gheen wasn't saying that Sen. Graham was being blackmailed, perhaps he was charging that immigration reform is somehow part of the Homosexual Agenda. Could we be planning to allow homosexuals from around the world into our country to infiltrate our post-Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell military so that we can rise through the ranks and achieve World Domination?

Since the weekend, when this cartoon was drawn, Sen. Graham has declared himself against any immigration reform bill likely to come out of this Congress, so I suppose Mr. Gheen's bizarre linking of the Senator's long-rumored "private life" and his openness toward moving immigration reform forward has had its desired effect. (For the record, I have no idea whether Sen. Graham is gay, straight, or a eunuch pining away for Greta Garbo.)

The question now is whether Republican or Teabag minders will trot out insinuations about Lindsey Graham — or any other unmarried politician — any time he is suspected of wavering from the Tea Party Line.