Afternoon Meme: "Newsweek" Gets Nothing Past Dustin Lance Black, Ryan Phillippe Embraces Gay Fans, More.

Plus, Happy Birthday Bea and Stephen, some behind-the-scenes Glee, The Ross Report debuts awkwardly, and guess who's playing gay?

This Newsweek thing just keeps giving. Newsweek editor Marc Peyser sat down with GLAAD president Jarrett Barrios and Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black to discuss it. Despite DLB doing an admirable job of trying to explain, the introduction that was added to the conversation just goes to prove that Newsweek fails to understand the issue, or indeed, writing. I am so sick of people saying “you misinterpreted my bigoted comments, but if you weren’t so sensitive, you’d interpret what I meant.” These non-apologies always tick me off because they never apologize – it’s always about the reader being wrong. Look:

The piece examined the difficulty gay actors can have in being cast as straight romantic characters. We'd hoped to stir discussion of why there are still so few openly gay performers in Hollywood, but that message was overwhelmed by readers who thought we were being hurtful and small-minded in our assessment. When a story is so widely misinterpreted, it's obvious we failed at making our point.

Jarret Barrios also penned an Op-Ed for Pop-Eater on the subject, while The Hollywood Reporter sits down with Barrios and DLB to discuss the issue without a clueless Newsweek editor.

In a happier place (Australia), stars have lent their time to a national television spot as part of the This Is Oz Campaign to combat homophobia and discrimination. h/t Crawfish Po Boy

I don’t even want to know how much money we’re going to spend to launch three solar satellites to prove the rest of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Can’t we do manned space travel instead of broad theory?

Modern Family tied its highest ratings ever last night for the Hawaiian vacation. I still think it needed a cursed Tiki Idol, then it could have beaten American Idol.

Paul English, who founded internet travel engine kayak.com, has started an ambitious 10-year project to bring wireless internet access to all of Africa, which is about the same amount of time it will take to the same service to Manhattan.

Towleroad has all the best quotes from Ryan Phillippe for his gay questions, like playing Billy Douglas, the Jay Leno “gay face” interview, and how he picks his roles.

Is Virgin Galactic’s $200,000 trip into space too rich for you? Space Adventures announced their cut-rate service will only cost $102,000, so now you can bring a friend. I have an opening on my calendar…

The Rockford Files reboot was considered a lock for a pickup for fall – up to the moment anybody saw it. Rumor has it was shot almost as a period piece instead of an homage, which was not what anybody but the director had in mind.

I’ve never heard of Pixar abandoning a film before, but that’s what they’re saying just happened to Newt, scheduled for next year. The story was supposed to be about a pair of newts, the last of their kind, forced together to save the species but who can’t stand each other.

People are saying people just aren’t that interested in Robin Hood at Cannes, where it just screened. The studio is talking about how the press loved it, but so far the press has had little to say about the $237 million project.

Today’s Stories from the Frontlines is Air Force SSgt. David Hall, who was dismissed from ROTC after serving with distinction for eight years and being accepted into pilot school. His homosexuality was deemed “incompatible with military service” despite all evidence to the contrary.

Adobe is taking out advertising to complain that Apple won’t let Flash play in their iPhone/iPad sandbox. It sounds petty, but then again, lack of Flash is why I don’t own an iPad. Then again again, Flash has crashed my laptop seven times this morning.

Lady Sovereign came out as lesbian in Diva magazine, despite pressure from her management to stay in the closet. You go, gurl!

LZ Granderson writes a powerful essay at CNN about closeted gays working against the movement for equality. I didn’t like a few of Granderson’s essays I read way back when, but he’s quickly becoming one of my favorite voices.

The Mazzoni Center in Philadelphia, a leading GLBT health services provider, is going to raise funds via a Diana Ross benefit performance May 21-22 in Atlantic City.

Back when I was in the Air Force, flight simulators were multimillion dollar custom rigs built by Silicon Graphics. Now they’re built out of a couple thousand PS3s. The problem is that Sony has a new firmware update that disables Linux on their game systems, which also shuts down the flight simulator.

Tom Ford sold his Andy Warhol self-portrait for $32.6 million, which was well above the $15 million he was hoping to get. I wonder if he’d like to buy me dinner or a small island with the extra money?

Will the new Transformers movie have the awful twins? And will it have Transformers that change into boats? Maybe.

Spork, a Mean Girls-type movie about an intersex teen is supposed to be the start of a new genre people are calling Bitpunk. This cerebral review explains both the movie and the genre. Just a shame it uses outdated gender variant terms.

Saban raised $500 million dollars to market new brands and make some serious coins. The first thing they did was buy the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers back from Disney, license it to Nintendo, and commit to making an 18^th season of the goofy show. A few of those Rangers have been kind of hot – I had a thing for a Blue Ranger named Billy at one point.

Happy birthday Stephen Colbert, who in his own way is an incredibly effective GLBT advocate. He's 46.

In sort of sad news, today would have been Bea Arthur's birthday - go have some cheesecake.

Most people don't take pictures at the gym because nobody really looks good there. But if you're Mark Salling, and it's Cory Monteith's birthday, you might try to embarrass him.

You're both pretty!

Speaking of Glee, thanks to boyculture's page of hot-guys-in-print-magazines, which is worth checking out for all the beefcake, we can show you this from next week's NPH episode.

From Cannes, we see an ad for this really, really bad idea starring Jack Black.

No famous line in movie history has been used and reused quite like this one from Star Wars.

Yes, I'm twelve.

Here we have Russell Tovey out to dinner in London.

And your afternoon dose of cute.

Last night on The Tonight Show, Jay Leno debuted "The Ross Report," with Ross Matthews essentially being given a few minutes to do a Video Meme live for a studio audience. I still think Jay comes across as uncomfortable around Ross' flamboyance, but since he essentially gave Ross his first platform, maybe I'm reading my own anti-Jay prejudice into that. Also, why am I not watching Sunset Days? And why aren't we recapping it?!?!?

We had two Daily Show moments last night. First, Michael Patrick King was on to talk about Sex and the City 2, but since he and Jon are old friends, most of the discussion was about when King came out to Stewart. It's easily one of the gayest interviews on The Daily Show ever.

I can never not run Lewis Black on the Daily Show. I watch television the same way he does these segments, screaming at what I perceive as gross stupidity. (I'm not much fun to live with.) Here he takes on Glenn Beck and his Nazi issues.

When Cougar Town first aired, I was convinced Travis (Dan Byrd) was gay. I think he just comes across that way to the point they even wrote him coming out to Grayson (Josh Hopkins) as a prank. So imagine my surprise to find him playing gay in Easy A, about a girl who fakes loud, noisy sex with him at a party so the jocks will stop beating him up. Things then get out of hand as she embraces her Scarlet Letter status. It stars Emma Stone, Amanda Bynes and Stanley Tucci, and comes out September 17th.

Thanks to reader T, I have this Invitation To The Set from True Blood that I'd missed, and almost all the characters/actors appear in this trailer, and makes waiting for June 13th that much harder.

Also from HBO, we have a preview with a very chubby Dennis Quaid as former President Clinton from the upcoming A Special Relationship about U.S.-UK relations.

And I know it's a downer, but if you haven't seen the oil leak on the seabed, take a minute to look at this disaster happen.