Nuggets & bites.

"[Monsignor Eugene] Clark [rector of New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral] has long upheld the Vatican belief that homosexuals ... want to destroy the institution of marriage ... Now here is Monsignor Clark ... exposed last week as engaging in an adulterous affair ... proving that the greatest threat to marriage is in fact pompous, hypocritical, heterosexual men who can't keep their dicks to themselves even as they become octogenarians."

--Michelangelo Signorile, writing in his syndicated column, August 20

"The WNBA keeps a strong lesbian fan base, as well as well as its lesbian players, in ...' a glass closet.' ... The collective understanding in the WNBA is that if you're a lesbian, you'd better hush up about it."

--From "The Glass Closet" by Sandra Kobrin and Jason Levin, reporting on the firing of lesbian WNBA player Latasha Byears after unproved allegations of sexual assault, in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, August 21

"The biggest boys in the seventh and eighth grades are setting a physical standard of masculinity--deep voices, big muscles--that creates anxiety in every other boy.... 'can I be a man if I'm not very athletic?' A 13-year-old boy hears the words 'gay' and 'fag' used in school every day and hopes they don't land on him."

--The one and only mention of gays or lesbians in Time magazine's 240-page August 8 cover package on "Being 13"

"R. Kelly's 'Trapped in the Closet'--a five-part, sixteen-minute-plus R&B soap opera starring a Beretta-toting hero, a gay pastor, and two unfaithful women--is one ot the weirdest pop songs in recent memory... 'There's that sick curiosity, like "Does he know this is funny, or is he serious"?' [says MTV's Amy Doyle.]"

--From an item by Brian Hiatt in the August 11 issue of Rolling Stone