AfterElton Briefs: Election News, the Winners of the "Married in the Air" Contest, and More!

X Factor winner Shayne Ward on the cover of Gay Times. Sorry fellas, Shayne is strayt.

• I failed. Yesterday I had vowed to vote in the afternoon and then not pay any attention to election results until it was all over and the dust had settled. Well, I was glued to MSNBC by 8 PM. With all of the bad news last night, there were a few bright spots. In my home state of NY, volatile nutjob Carl Paladino lost to the "legendary prowess" of Andrew Cuomo. And then he proceeded to give a concession speech involving a ... baseball bat ... and veiled threats. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the hell he was going for here.

• Fellow Tea Party crazies (and phobes) Sharron Angle, Christine O'Donnell and likely Joe Miller also lost, which may be good for us, but will be tragic for late night comedians. Lost in all of the results is the fact that a record 106 gay candidates have been elected to U.S. public office in 2010.

• Oh, and this just in: Democrat Michael Bennet has beaten Republican Ken Buck, who compared being gay to being alcoholic, to be Colorado's senator.

• Burgeoning star Tom Hardy has apparently been offered the Mr. Miyagi role in Abraham Lincoln - Vampire Hunter.

• Below you can see the preview for The Will: Family Secrets Revealed, which airs at 9 PM EST on Investigation Discovery. Tonight's episode is about Joan Crawford's infamous last will, and it includes her daughter Christina, as well as ... wait for it ... reenactments!

• Just Jared has Ricky Martin and Joss Stone's performance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. I watched the interview yesterday and Ricky was warm, sincere, and eloquent. Oh, and hot.

Aleksandar Mijatovic and Shantu Bhattacherjee(L) and Thomas Landreth and Brett Kessler

• Big congrats to the winners of the Scandinavian Airlines contest to become the first same-sex couple married in the air. German couple Aleksandar Mijatovic and Shantu Bhattacherjee will tie the knot on December 6 between Stockholm and New York. And congrats to North Carolina couple Thomas Landreth and Brett Kessler , who won the U.S.-based "love" competition and will be married in ... an ice hotel. Is the Snow Queen sponsoring this? Oh wait, it's the Ice Hotel, which is totally ... cool.

• With the release of the new Pet Shop Boys collection "Ultimate" imminent, Chart Rigger takes a look at the 19 most essential Pet Shop Boys non-singles. Unfortunately, I'm not a big enough fan to have heard of most of these, but I still have my cassingle of "Domino Dancing" in a box somewhere.

• Below you can see a preview for tonight's Top Chef: Just Desserts in which temperatures rise inside Yigit's sugar vase, until clumsy oaf Morgan ruins everything "accidentally." I'm sure Morgan's response will be "well, I'm a heterosexual man, and that's what heterosexual men do."

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