1. RIP E. Lynn Harris. There is still no official cause of death.

2. Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava, is pro choice and supports gay marriage. The Republican is  running in the 23rd District’s (NY) special election. A few Repubs are loudly saying she does not represent the GOP.

3. Looks like Iran has fell off the fold.

4. Does it mean anything that I’ve never been to Fire Island, NY?

5. Ex-governor Sarah Palin has to hire some speech writers.

6. Congressional candidate Anthony Woods (another West Point grad discharged because of DADT) is  getting some national exposure for his campaign.

7. Nothing is more depressing than listening to minorities argue what is, or isn’t, part of a particular minority experience.

8. Never been perceived as a  good minority (by gays or blacks). Plan on keeping it that way.

9. New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has secured a promise from the Senate Armed Services Committee to have fall hearings on DADT.

10. I’m starting to appreciate Godfather III.

1. Dear  John Hodgman: please marry me. We can raise nerdy children.

2. Youtube is my week-end crack.

3. When will Pride events be over?

4. You and your lovah might be counted in the upcoming census!

5. Solitude becomes me.

6. This picture makes me worry about what will happen in Iran.

7. Looks like gay marriage will get voted on in New York. Empire State Pride Agenda thinks this is a good idea. What will happen is any one’s guess.

8. Americans winning a soccer match/game?! Get out!

9. When did New York City turn into Seattle? Nothing against the Emerald City but I’m not prepared for days and days and days and days of rain.

10. A Senate apology for slavery? Meh.

1. Anyone who sells private pictures of a former lover/fun buddy  is a jerk.

2. Looks like a march on Washington D.C. is moving along.

3. The Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA championship. There is a disturbance in the force.

4. Will the protesters in Iran survive the brutality of the state?

5. Not much to add about the Department of Justice’s defense of DOMA. The adversary idea looks more tempting, no?

6. Flip-flops on city streets equals nasty.

7. What do you think of the new random thought photo?

8. For some reason I feel like a poser reading The Brothers Karamazov on the subway.

9. If you are looking for a provocative take on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, check out Michael Yon’s site.

10. I love city parks but not so much that I will stand in line for  a wristband to walk through one.

The men, Ali, 32, and Mohammad, 25, arrived in Toronto Wednesday night. Their family names are being withheld to protect family members still in Iran.

The Islamic state routinely rounds up gays. A number have been placed on trial and sentenced to death according to international human rights groups although the government officially has said the executions were for other offences.

In 2005 Ali and Mohammad fled Iran for India where they sought and obtained help from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees to relocate in Canada  the Toronto Sun reported Thursday.

UNHCR made an “urgent and high priority” plea for their resettlement at the Canadian embassy in New Delhi, Arsham Parsi, of Iranian Queer Railroad, told The Sun.

The organization is modeled after the Underground Railroad that helped slaves from the US South escape to Canada in the mid 19th Century. Iranian Queer Road says it has helped more than 60 gay Iranian refugees resettle in Canada, the U.S. and Australia.

“There are many more Iranian queer refugees who are still being processed,” Parsi told The Sun.

Ali and Mohammad were staying with friends in Toronto on Thursday.

“It took them three years to get here,” said Parsi. “Canada is a gay-friendly country and they will be successful here.”

The attorney, Masoud Shafii, said authorities notified him this week of the sentences handed to the two physicians, Arash and Kamyar Alaei, who are brothers and were convicted over the weekend. Shafii said he would appeal the verdicts.

The prosecution of the doctors raised an outcry among international human rights groups and critics who said the case was the latest instance of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hard-line government targeting Iranians with Western connections and depicting them as tools for an American campaign to overthrow the regime.

The brothers ran a clinic in Tehran and HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programs throughout the country, focusing particularly on at-risk sectors like prostitutes and drug users. They also traveled extensively to international AIDS conferences, and Kamyar Alaei was pursuing a doctorate at the SUNY Albany School of Public Health in Albany, New York.

The charges against the Alaeis are similar to those Iran made against four Iranian-Americans in 2007, including academic Haleh Esfandiari. Those four were imprisoned or had their passports confiscated for several months until they were released and allowed to return to the U.S. They all denied the allegations.

The brothers’ trial on Dec. 31 was shrouded in secrecy, and Shafii said the judge only notified him of the verdict on Tuesday. Two other people were sentenced with the doctors, but neither their identities nor the lengths of their prison terms are known.

The Alaeis were convicted under an Iranian law that stipulates that anyone cooperating with a foreign “hostile” government against Iran can be sentenced to between one and 10 years in prison.

However, the lawyer said only the Supreme National Security Council can define whether the U.S. is hostile. Since it has not done so, the brothers’ activities “were not against Iran,” said Shafii.

But the lawyer refused to elaborate since legally he was not allowed to reveal the content of a verdict.

On Monday, the official IRNA news agency quoted an unnamed intelligence official as saying the brothers were convicted of taking part in a U.S.-backed plot to overthrow Iran’s ruling establishment. The official said the Alaeis tried to create a social crisis and stir up street demonstrations and ethnic disputes in Iran.

The prosecution appears to have more to do with the brothers’ contacts with the U.S. than their AIDS work.

Numerous medical and scientific organizations have publicly called for the release of the brothers, who have been held in Evin prison just north of Tehran since late June 2008.

The Massachusetts-based Physicians for Human Rights expressed deep concern Wednesday over purported confessions by the Alaeis that the group said were used by Iranian authorities to convict them. The confessions may have been forcibly extracted, the group warned in an e-mail sent to The Associated Press.

According to a press release Wednesday from the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, the mother of Alaei brothers told a local news Web site, Rooz Online, that her sons were held for 63 days in solitary confinement and that she feared that they might be tortured to coerce false confessions on camera.

Tension between the Washington and Tehran has been high in recent years over Iran’s nuclear program and the country’s alleged support of Shiite militias in Iraq – a charge Tehran denies.

The prosecution of scientists Arash and Kamyar Alaei, who have been held in prison since June 2008, has raised an outcry among international human rights groups. The Alaei brothers and two others were tried in a closed-door trial last month.

The state news agency IRNA said Monday that the Alaei brothers and the two other defendants were convicted of recruiting dozens of others and planned to recruit more Iranian doctors, university professors and scientists to provide information to the U.S on Iran’s infrastructure and civil defense.

“They aimed at creating social crisis, street demonstrations and ethnic disputes,” the report quoted the general director of the counterespionage section of Iran’s Intelligence Ministry as saying, without providing his name.

He said the CIA spent some $32 million on the plot and accused the U.S. of stationing intelligence agents in neighboring countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Kuwait and Azerbaijan.

IRNA initially announced on Saturday that four people had been convicted and sentenced in an alleged plot supported by the CIA and U.S. State Department, but it had not mentioned their names. Monday’s report was the first confirming the Alaeis were among those convicted. Neither report said how long a prison term they had been sentenced to or identified the other two defendants.

The Alaei brothers’ lawyer was not immediately available for comment.

They have run HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programs in Iran, focusing particularly on at risk sectors like prostitutes and drug users. They have also held training courses for Afghan and Tajik medical workers.

Tension between the Washington and Tehran has been high in recent years over Iran’s nuclear program and alleged support for Shiite militias in Iraq. The two countries have not had diplomatic relations since Iranian students took over the U.S. embassy in 1979 and held it for 444 days.

McCain’s ties are facing renewed scrutiny after his campaign criticized Barack Obama for his link to a former radical who engaged in violent acts 40 years ago.

The U.S. Council for World Freedom was part of an international organization linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America. The group was dedicated to stamping out communism around the globe.

The council’s founder, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, said McCain became associated with the organization in the early 1980s as McCain was launching his political career in Arizona. Singlaub said McCain was a supporter but not an active member in the group.

“McCain was a new guy on the block learning the ropes,” Singlaub told The Associated Press in an interview. “I think I met him in the Washington area when he was just a new congressman. We had McCain on the board to make him feel like he wasn’t left out. It looks good to have names on a letterhead who are well-known and appreciated.

“I don’t recall talking to McCain at all on the work of the group,” Singlaub said.

The renewed attention over McCain’s association with Singlaub’s group comes as McCain’s campaign steps up criticism of Obama’s dealings with William Ayers, a college professor who co-founded the Weather Underground and years later worked on education reform in Chicago alongside Obama. Ayers held a meet-the-candidate event at his home when Obama first ran for public office in the mid-1990s.

Obama was roughly 8 years old when Ayers, now at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was working with the Weather Underground, which took responsibility for bombings that included nonfatal blasts at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol. McCain’s vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, has said that Obama “pals around with terrorists.”

In McCain’s case, Singlaub knew McCain’s father, a Navy admiral who had sought Singlaub’s counsel when McCain, a Navy pilot, became a prisoner of war and spent 5 1/2 years in North Vietnamese hands.

“John’s father asked me for advice about what he ought to do now that his son had been shot down and captured,” Singlaub recalled in one of two recent interviews. “I said, ‘As long as you don’t give any impression that you care more about him than you care about any of the other prisoners, he won’t be treated any differently.’”

Covert arms shipments to the rebels called Contras, financed in part by secret arms sales to Iran, became known as the Iran-Contra affair. They proved to be the undoing of Singlaub’s council.

In 1987, the Internal Revenue Service withdrew the tax-exempt status of Singlaub’s group because of its activities on behalf of the Contras.

Elected to the House in 1982 and at a time when he was on the board of Singlaub’s council, McCain was among Republicans on Capitol Hill expressing support for the Contras, a CIA-organized guerrilla force in Central America. In 1984, Congress cut off CIA funds for the Contras.

Months before the cutoff, top Reagan administration officials ramped up a secret White House-directed supply network and put National Security Council aide Oliver North in charge of running it. The goal was to keep the Contras operational until Congress could be persuaded to resume CIA funding.

Singlaub’s private group became the public cover for the White House operation.

Secretly, Singlaub worked with North in an effort to raise millions of dollars from foreign governments.

McCain has said previously he resigned from the council in 1984 and asked in 1986 to have his name removed from the group’s letterhead.

“I didn’t know whether (the group’s activity) was legal or illegal, but I didn’t think I wanted to be associated with them,” McCain said in a newspaper interview in 1986.

Singlaub does not recall any McCain resignation in 1984 or May 1986. Nor does Joyce Downey, who oversaw the group’s day-to-day activities.

“That’s a surprise to me,” Singlaub said. “This is the first time I’ve ever heard that. There may have been someone in his office communicating with our office.”

“I don’t ever remember hearing about his resigning, but I really wasn’t worried about that part of our activities, a housekeeping thing,” said Singlaub. “If he didn’t want to be on the board that’s OK. It wasn’t as if he had been active participant and we were going to miss his help. He had no active interest. He certainly supported us.”

Ahmadinejad caused a stir last year during a speech at Columbia University when he declared there were no homosexuals in Iran.

“In Iran we don’t have homosexuals like you do in your country.  We do not have this phenomenon. I don’t know who’s told you that we have it,” Ahmadinejad said at the time.

Tuesday night the Iranian president was questioned about the controversial remarks by CNN’s Larry King.

“I said it is not the way it is here. In Iran this is considered a very – obviously, most people dislike it. And we have, actually, a law regarding it and the law is enforced,” he told King.

Ahmadinejad went on to claim “we do pay attention that in Iran nobody interferes in the private lives of individuals. We have nothing to do with the private realm of people. This is at the – non-private, public morality. In their own house, nobody ever interferes.”

Ahmadinejad was in New York where he spoke at the United Nations earlier on Tuesday, declaring that the “American empire in the world is reaching the end of its road,” and denouncing Israel.

Iran’s persecution of gays has been documented by exiles and international rights groups.

Last year in a meeting between Iranian and British parliamentarians, a high ranking Iranian politician for the first time acknowledged that the Islamic state upholds the death penalty for homosexuality.

The disclosure was made in private but appeared in minutes of the meeting obtained by The Times newspaper.

Iranian law provides punishments up to death for penetrative same-sex sexual activity between men on the first conviction, and punishes non-penetrative activity with up to 100 lashes.

Homosexual conduct between women is punishable with death on the fourth conviction. Iran’s Penal Code requires four reiterated confessions, or the testimony of four “righteous men” as eyewitnesses, to prove lavat, or sodomy. However, judges are permitted to accept circumstantial evidence or inference.

Some international gay rights groups believe that more than 4,000 lesbians and gay men have been executed since the Ayatollahs seized power in 1979.

In 2005, two young men were hanged in a public square in northern Iran after they allegedly were found guilty of homosexuality. The government claimed they had been convicted of kidnapping and raping a male teen.

Hundreds of others have been rounded up and allegedly imprisoned, many of them as a result of raids on private homes.  None of the allegations has been confirmed by independent sources.

The struggles of seven transsexuals depicted in the film are made more complicated by Iran’s strict gender codes and cultural obstacles. But Motamedian, who is best known in Iran for theater work, insists the problems they face are universal to transsexuals anywhere in the world: finding their identity and seeking acceptance from their families.

“We know that throughout the world this problems exists,” Motamedian said. “The idea was to raise awareness among families especially, because this is the first layer of barrier, and to help people to realize they are not alone and be able to face the problem.”

Motamedian said he was inspired by the Italian neo-realists in his filmmaking, and for the movie he cast transsexuals, not professional actors, to act a role that he created.

“The cast I worked with had no cinematic training, which I thought would be useful to access things that a professional actor wouldn’t be capable,” Motamedian said.

“Usually an actor is trained to show things. I thought it was important to show what a person was hiding,” he told a news conference Friday.

“Tedium,” which is being shown out of competition, delves into the lives of seven transsexuals as they struggle with the question of whether they can find true romantic love, whether to go through with a sex change operation, how to tell their families – and in one case, a wife – and whether to remain in Iran.

Motamedian said the most difficult casting was for Shiva, the one female-to-male transsexual in the film.

“Right up to the day of shooting I hadn’t found a suitable character to play that role … and I even thought about cutting her out,” Motamedian said. “As it is a very masculine and male-oriented society, the thought of really coming out and revealing that fact they wanted to come out and revealing they are not a ‘real’ male … has real problems. All of the women I met who wanted to be male didn’t want this to be known, for them it was a real problem coming out.”

Motamedian said the movie was made without going through official channels to get permission – meaning without government financial support. But it also means the film won’t be shown in Iran.