The research paper: Shared Differences: The Experiences of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Students of Color in Our Nation’s Schools, was rele ased by GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network.

The report documents the experiences of over 2,000 LGBT middle and high school students of color who were African American or Black, Latino, Asian or Pacific Islander, Native American, and multiracial.

The researchers used data collected in 2007 as part of GLSEN’s biennial survey of LGBT students along with results from in-depth individual and group interviews.

“While research on the experiences of LGBT students has increased in recent years, few studies have examined the specific victimization of students who identify as people of color and LGBT,” said GLSEN Executive Director Dr. Eliza Byard.

“Our schools are diverse environments, and it is important to understand how our students experiences differ based on personal characteristics such as race and ethnicity. This report provides alarming evidence that we must act now to ensure sure that America’s LGBT students of color are safe in school.”

The report also provides descriptions of the experiences of LGBT students of color in their own words.

“You could very well on any day hear someone yelling across the hall, ‘fag,’ etc,” said a 10th grade Latino male student in the report. “I’ve heard it before. … It’s hurtful because it’s just not something that you say. And it’s just generally hurtful. And I know that I’ll just be walking in a hallway, and someone will just say under their breath with a group of friends, “fag” … and hearing things like that in my school – it kind of brings me down almost. It kind of negates any hope that I have for our school to be a better place.”

The report found that across all groups, sexual orientation and gender expression were the most common reasons LGBT students of color reported feeling unsafe in school. More than four out of five students, within each racial/ethnic group, reported verbal harassment in school because of sexual orientation and about two-thirds because of gender expression. At least a third of each group reported physical violence in school because of sexual orientation.

More than half of African American/Black, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander, and multiracial students also reported verbal harassment in school based on their race or ethnicity. Native American students – 43 percent – were less likely than other students to report experiencing racially motivated verbal harassment.

About a quarter of African American/Black and Asian/Pacific Islander students had missed class or days of school in the past month because they felt unsafe. Latino, Native American, and multiracial students were even more likely to be absent for for safety reasons – about a third or more skipped class at least once or missed at least one day of school in the past month for safety reasons.

Native American students experienced particularly high levels of victimization because of their religion, with more than half reporting the highest levels of verbal harassment, and a quarter experiencing physical violence.

The report also found that performance at school also suffered when students experienced high levels of victimization. Students’ overall GPA dropped when they reported high severities of harassment based on sexual orientation and/or race/ethnicity. Students experiencing high severities of harassment also reported missing school more often.

The ban drew its strongest support from both evangelical Christians and voters who didn’t attend college, according to results released by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Age and race, meanwhile, were not as strong factors as assumed. According to the poll, 56 percent of voters over age 55 and 57 percent of nonwhite voters cast a yes ballot for the gay marriage ban.

People who identified themselves as practicing Christians were highly likely to support the constitutional amendment, with 85 percent of evangelical Christians, 66 percent of Protestants and 60 percent of Roman Catholics favoring it.

The poll also showed that the measure got strong backing from voters who did not attend college (69 percent), voters who earned less than $40,000 a year (63 percent) and Latinos (61 percent).

The proposition, which passed with 52 percent of the vote, overturned the state Supreme Court’s May decision legalizing gay marriage in California. The measure inserts language into the constitution limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

The poll found that, overall, 48 percent of voters oppose the idea of making gay marriage legal. Forty-seven percent support it, while 5 percent are undecided.

The results mirror previous PPIC polls from the last three years, suggesting that the $73 million spent for and against the measure did not do much to change public attitudes on allowing gay couples to wed, said survey director Mark Baldassare.

“At no point in time, before or after the election, did we have a majority of Californians saying they supported gay marriage,” Baldassare said. “My takeaway from this is that until there is a major shift in public opinion one way or another, it’s going to be another issue where voters are deeply divided.”

Geoffrey Kors, executive director of the gay rights group Equality California, said the PPIC poll demonstrates that same-sex marriage advocates “need to make inroads in every category. If 2 percent of voters had voted differently, we would have had a different result,” he said.

The poll was based on a phone survey of 2,003 California voters in the Nov. 4 election who were interviewed from Nov. 5-6. The sampling error was plus or minus 2 percentage points.

A separate poll by Harris Interactive for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation released on Wednesday found nationally three-quarters of Americans favor either marriage or domestic partnerships/civil unions for gay and lesbian couples. 

It is an intriguing solution to end the AIDS epidemic. But it is based on assumptions rather than data, and is riddled with logistical problems. The research was published online Tuesday in the medical journal, The Lancet.

“It’s quite a startling result,” said Charlie Gilks, an AIDS treatment expert at the World Health Organization and one of the paper’s authors. “In a relatively short amount of time, we could potentially knock the epidemic on its head.”

Gilks and colleagues used data from South Africa and Malawi. In their model, people were voluntarily tested each year and immediately given drugs if they tested positive for HIV, regardless of whether they were sick.

Within 10 years, HIV infections dropped by 95 percent. Other initiatives like safe sex education and male circumcision were also used.

The strategy would cut the estimated number of AIDS deaths between 2008 and 2050 by about half, from about 8.7 million to 3.9 million, leaving only sporadic HIV cases.

Experts think the strategy’s cost would peak at about $3.4 billion a year, though expenses would fall after an initial investment.

“This is certainly beyond the bounds of the current infrastructure for many countries, but that is not a reason not to think big,” said Myron Cohen, of the University of North Carolina, who has done similar research. He was not involved in the WHO study.

Only 3 million people are currently on AIDS drugs. Nearly 7 million people are still awaiting treatment, and about 3 million more people were infected last year. Worldwide, WHO guesses that about 33 million people have HIV.

Increasing access to testing and drugs would stretch already weak health systems in Africa, which has most of the world’s HIV cases.

“This is not like giving someone a Tylenol,” said Jennifer Kates, director of HIV policy for the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington, DC. Once people start AIDS drugs, they must continue indefinitely. “The idea should be explored, but it’s a huge leap,” Kates said.

Handing out AIDS drugs to everyone who tests positive could also worsen drug resistance.

In addition, doctors don’t know if it’s safe to take AIDS drugs for decades; the oldest drug combinations have only been around for about a dozen years.

Other experts questioned whether the strategy might infringe on patient’s rights. Once people test positive for HIV, they would be advised to start treatment, even if they weren’t sick.

That would benefit the community, but not necessarily the patients themselves. AIDS drugs come with side effects including vomiting, liver failure, and heart attacks.

WHO emphasized that the study findings do not signal a policy change. “This is only a theoretical exercise,” said Dr. Kevin De Cock, director of WHO’s HIV/AIDS department. He said WHO would hold a meeting next year to study the idea more closely.

Town councilman Freek Ossel said the University of Amsterdam study, commissioned by the city, said the Dutch capital must improve protection of gays, increase education, and encourage reporting of discriminatory incidents.

“Amsterdam’s title as a gay capital, according to some people, has already been gone for years, and according to others in any case it’s at stake,” he said.

The study said 67 attacks were reported in Amsterdam in 2007. Police commissioner Leo Wilde said the number was about average for recent years and “is not decreasing.”

The figure is difficult to compare with other cities. Amsterdam, with 750,000 people, has tried for years to improve reporting of anti-gay incidents, but police believe most still go unreported.

The study found that most attacks were carried out spontaneously by poorly educated young men who feel their masculinity has been questioned.

“In 40 percent of cases the trigger is if people think they’re being targeted” for seduction, said Laurens Buijs, one of the study’s authors. Attackers “see gays as predatory animals that can strike at any moment.”

The study drew its title “As Long As They Keep Away From Me” from that fear. It concluded that the tolerance often professed by Dutch youth is only a veneer: gay men are accepted only as long as they don’t display stereotypically gay behavior.

The study combined a broad survey of Amsterdam youth with in-depth interviews with smaller groups. Authors also interviewed individual attackers and reviewed recent cases.

“It’s very sad confirmation of what we already suspected,” said Dennis Boutkan, chairman of the Union for Homosexual Integration. “The layer of social acceptance of homosexuality is exceptionally fragile and thin.”

The scientists hope their work could lead to a whole new approach to therapy – bolstering the body’s natural ability to fight the disease by revitalizing these immune system cells, known as CD8 killer cells.

Co-author Dr. Mario Ostrowski, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Toronto, said that with most infections – such as influenza – CD8 killer cells are able to seek out and destroy other cells that have been infiltrated by a virus.

But with HIV, the CD8s “don’t produce all the chemicals required to kill infected cells,” he said Monday. “They can’t perform any function … They’re just totally wimpy and exhausted.”

One thing the researchers discovered, however, is that these tired-out CD8 killer cells exhibit high levels of a molecule normally used to slow down the immune system after it has successfully dispatched a viral or bacterial invader.

In test-tube experiments on cells taken from people with HIV, the researchers found they could resurrect the CD8 killer cells by blocking this molecule, called Tim-3.

“We observed that blocking the Tim-3 pathway rescued those cells and restored their ability to fight off infection,” Ostrowski said.

The research, published in the Journal of Experimental Medicine, opens up the possibility of new therapies aimed at blocking the Tim-3 signal and reinvigorating the immune system’s natural disease-fighting ability.

Currently, the most effective HIV treatments are antiviral drugs that stop the virus from replicating. But they only work in about 80 per cent of infected people and have to be taken for life. If the drugs are stopped, the virus soon begins its relentless destruction of the body’s immune system.

“We still do not know how the virus triggers Tim-3 or if this is restricted to HIV infection,” said co-principal author Dr. Lishomwa Ndhlovu of the University of California at San Francisco.

“But our findings may provide a new direction to vaccines and therapies that will potentially reverse these dysfunctional cells and allow them to control HIV-1 replication,” Ndhlovu said in a release.

Commenting on the research, some HIV-AIDS experts hailed the work as innovative and promising, but cautioned that it is early days yet.

“I think it’s a wonderful study,” said Dr. Mark Wainberg, director of the McGill AIDS Centre at Jewish General Hospital in Montreal.

“Of course, this is not something that’s going to be easily translated into patient benefit in the short term,” he said. “But it provides insight into how the immune system breaks down after HIV infection occurs, as well as into what we might need to do in order to try to bolster immunity in people who have HIV disease.”

Dr. Evan Wood, a researcher at the B.C. Center for Excellence in HIV-AIDS, called the research provocative and exciting because it’s “a new way of looking at HIV treatment.”

“But it’s also at this point still happening on the bench side, on the test-tube level,” Wood said from Vancouver. “And it remains to be seen if this is something that will really impact the … world of HIV treatment.”

The survey, for Logo Network, discovered that more LGBT people expect to lead an integrated life raising families in suburbs or small towns while maintaining their identity and sense of community.

The study was conducted in in partnership with Simmons and TRU. 365gay is owned by Logo, a division of Viacom Inc.’s MTV Networks.

The survey found that 79 percent of gay people think it’s important to integrate into the greater culture and 64 percent are open about their sexual orientation to at least their family members.

It also found that less than half of gay people want to live in a city and a majority want to live in suburbia or small-town America.  Regardless of where they want to live, 58 percent want to live closer to other gay people.

The researchers said that two-thirds of younger gay people expect to be partnered with kids at some point in their adulthood, while less than a third of gays 35 and older expect the same.

Younger gay people have an even mix of gay and straight friends, the network said in a statement. And overall, gay people rank marriage equality as the number one issue about which they’re passionate, followed by the environment, health care and the economy.

“We’re trading in West Hollywood for West Texas and big disposable incomes for disposable diapers,” said Lisa Sherman, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Logo.

“Most important, we’re integrating without abandoning our community or sense of identity.  These developments are good for LGBT people and good for America.”

The research also found that despite gay people’s love for mainstream media, they want entertainment that speaks to their uniquely gay lives and experiences.  Sherman said that this finding supports Logo’s efforts to develop programming like the recent Sordid Lives: The Series that tell authentic LGBT stories, sometimes with many LGBT characters and sometimes only a few.

The research involved a qualitative study in partnership with TRU Research of 21-45 year olds in New York and Dallas as well as a national survey in partnership with Simmons of 1,800 LGBT people between the ages of 21 and 59.

The study, prepared by UCLA’s Williams Institute,  found more than 85,000 couples have already signed up for legal recognition in 11 states – 40 percent of all same-sex couples in these states.

The report compiles data from the 11 states that recognize same-sex couples through marriage, civil unions, domestic partnerships, or other legal statuses. These data also show that same-sex couples who marry or register are more likely to be female couples than male couples, and same-sex couples tend to be younger than existing different-sex married couples.

The findings also shed new light on the current experience in California, where thousands of same-sex couples are reported to have already married.

“Marriage clearly gets the most enthusiastic response from same-sex couples, as we’re seeing in California,” explained co-author M. V. Lee Badgett, research director of the Williams Institute and director of the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“In Massachusetts, 37 percent of gay and lesbian couples got married within the first year that marriage was available, but only one in 10 gay couples registered a civil union or domestic partnership in the first year after the introduction of those statuses.”

The study predicts that if every state offered marriage to same-sex couples today, approximately 370,000 couples would marry in the next three years.

“Not only are same-sex couples getting legally partnered, but their relationships are just as stable as marriages of different-sex couples,” noted co-author Gary Gates, senior research fellow of the Williams Institute.

“Only 1-3 percent of same-sex couples dissolve their legal relationships each year, which is comparable to the 2 percent  of those in different-sex marriages who divorce annually.”

The US Census Bureau recently confirmed that they do not plan on counting same-sex married couples in the 2010 Census, instead relegating all of these couples to “unmarried partner” status. 

According to study co-author Gates, “This report demonstrates why it is so important for government agencies like the Census Bureau to find ways to count the more than 85,000 same-sex couples who are in legally recognized unions.”

This study was made possible by a grant from Merrill Lynch. Read the full study here.

The researchers, including a top National Institutes of Health official, want new people with new ideas to step up and join the search. They say the focus of their research should be on discovering a vaccine rather than on clinical trials for evaluating medicines that may or may not work.

“Design of a vaccine that blocks HIV infection will require enormous intellectual leaps beyond present day knowledge,” concluded a broad team of researchers writing in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

More than 6,500 new HIV infections occur daily worldwide. A recent high-profile trial of a potential vaccine not only failed to prevent infection, but those who got the inoculation appeared at increased risk of infection compared with those who were given a placebo.

After the disappointing results, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases held a summit in March on how to reinvigorate vaccine research.

The institute will still support studies in people – but it is raising the bar that candidate vaccines need to pass to get federal support. NIH is looking for fresh ideas on how to approach HIV vaccine discovery, and emphasizing basic laboratory research to fill in key gaps in knowledge. Among the priorities will be increased research in chimpanzees, the Science article says.

The recent failed vaccine study showed “we were maybe on the wrong track a bit,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the institute’s director, told a Science podcast. “We will be turning the knob, as I like to say, more preferentially toward answering some of the fundamental questions that have gone unanswered,” he said.

When contractors don’t meet milestones, or when initiatives don’t attract the highest quality of applications, money will be redirected to more promising research activities, Fauci’s team wrote. Unfortunately, the need for more resources aimed at discovering a vaccine comes at a time when the National Institutes of Health’s budget remains flat, the officials said.

“Should growth in the NIH budget be reinstated in future years, one of the highest priorities will be to target those additional resources to HIV vaccine programs, particularly vaccine discovery research,” the health officials wrote.