Shannon was used to her socially awkward son being bullied by other boys at the private school he attends in Atlanta.

But when she picked him up from school in mid-January and her eighth grader told her he was being called a "simp," Shannon, who's only using her first name to protect her son's identity, didn't know what to think.

"He's telling me this and I'm driving and I'm trying to make sense of it," she said. "I'd never heard the word."
"He told me, 'It basically means that I'm just being nice to girls because I like them,'" she said. "I was like, wait, my kid is being picked on for being nice to girls?"

Her son had told her he'd recently been put in the "friend zone" by one of the girls, who made it clear she wasn't interested in dating him. They had continued to be friendly.

In 2017, our 5-year-old son came home from kindergarten and said he was studying a famous teenage transgender girl in school. I’d never heard of her, but he said her name was Jazz Jennings (formerly a boy who transitioned a few years ago and has so far had three gender reassignment surgeries.)

I knew his school was liberal, so in the beginning I didn’t worry too much. But I did tell the principal I thought it was inappropriate. He disagreed. He told me, “We would never teach something inappropriate.”

In 2018, my son and daughter were in the same elementary school, and their principal started involving parents as if they were part of the problem, too. We were told to read Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” and Ibram X. Kendi’s book, “How to Be an Antiracist.” I read both books, and had issues with them both. Alexander argues that the war on drugs is racist. This is crazy talk because drugs were and still are devastating the black community. Kendi says that unless you’re actively pushing for “equity” all the time, you’re racist. So, for example, the city wants to abolish testing for its more competitive schools because there aren’t enough black kids passing the test. But this lowers the bar for everyone. In my opinion, this so-called anti-racism is hurting black people.

Angela Deem is a reality star, a newly married woman, and a 55-year-old grandmother.

Over the years, she has made questionable choices both on and off camera.

Some of the people closest to her have made much, much worse choices.

One man in her orbit has now been arrested on a number of charges, including murder.

There, he was known as "DJ Doug," where he appeared on Angela Deem's storyline.

He was featured as an "events coordinator" at one of the potential venues that Angela investigated -- when, at the time, she had hoped to bring Michael over on a K-1 visa and marry him in Georgia.

Interestingly, it has been rumored that Dougie Doug and Angela were actually closer than any of the viewing audience was led to believe.

Heralded as the safest big city in America in recent years, New York City is closing out its bloodiest year in nearly a decade, grappling with a surge in homicides and a pandemic authorities say has helped fuel violence.

The city had recorded 447 killings as of Tuesday, a 41% increase over last year and the largest number since 2011. The number of people shot has more than doubled last year’s total, nearing a 14-year high.

Among the victims: a 1-year-old boy sitting in his stroller at a summer cookout; a 53-year-old teacher walking his dog; and a 43-year-old mother looking out the window of her child’s third-floor bedroom. All three were killed by stray bullets.

Discovering what took place behind the scenes of our favorite films can either be fascinating or it can be heartbreaking.

In the case of international star Judy Garland, it is the latter.

Only 16 when she took on the role of Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz, the actor was endured abuse throughout the making of the film, with her mother’s full knowledge and consent.

Garland’s mother, Ethel Gumm, according to the biography Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland by Gerald Clarke, was a combative and harsh stage mother. She plied her daughter with pills as young as age 10 — stimulants to keep her up and then sleeping pills when she wasn’t needed on the set.

Gumm sanctioned the appalling diet the studio required of her daughter in order to make her look as young as possible: chicken soup, black coffee, 80 cigarettes, diet pills, and amphetamines. Garland was addicted to prescription pills for the rest of her life.

Disgraced actor Kevin Spacey shared a third annual Christmas Eve video Thursday that left many wondering whether he knew how to read the room.

The nearly 2½-minute YouTube video, which he also posted on his Twitter feed, featured Spacey, 61, addressing the camera directly while walking in an unidentified park.

Someone asked me the other day what my favorite movie was, and I immediately said Arthur, like I always do. Then they said, “Never heard of it? When did it come out?” I didn’t answer 1981, nearly 40 years ago. At that moment I felt old, out of date, and superficially shallow.

Thus, I was not surprised by a new report from The Fenway Institute that found older LGBTQ+ adults in the state of Massachusetts have been diagnosed with depression at twice the rate of their straight, cisgender peers. It could be Massachusetts or any other state, or any other country because depression among older LGBTQ+ people is real, and no doubt much more widespread than we ever realize. I always tell people that if it could happen to me, the proverbial life of the party, it can happen to anyone. Having dealt with severe depression, and then having sought out many older LGBTQ+ people who also experienced similar circumstances, I found it remarkable that we all suffered from some sort of PTSD from our youths.

Again, not surprised that the report also found that LGBTQ+ individuals were twice as likely to fall and be injured in a fall over the past year, and I wouldn’t be shocked to hear if some of that was related to dangerous behavior about feeling alone and useless. Another woman, a lesbian, told me that she had a life-threatening operation, and has not been the same since and feels there’s nothing to live for, except her cat, who is 10. Otherwise, she is alone, without her partner who died, and without a family to take care of her. The family has made her feel shame for who she is, and she worries about being alone for the remainder of her life. Some days, she doesn’t feel like getting out of bed, and subsists on her Social Security checks, desperately afraid that she’ll end up in a nursing home left to die. We didn’t discuss it, but I’m sure she feels equal trepidation about not being able to pay the costs of round-the-clock care.

A man has gone viral online after recording his phone conversation with his mother, telling her that he was now engaged to his boyfriend.

“I want to invite you,” Jimenez explains, “but I know you don’t approve that I’m marrying my boyfriend.”

“I can’t believe you’re being serious about this,” his mother is captioned as saying. “Do you know that’s a sin in front of the eyes of God? Do you know that?”

“You’re so wrong. You can’t see it but you’re so wrong,” she shoots back. “At what point did you meet that guy? That guy has blinded you, he doesn’t want anything to do with God.

Despite its collection development policy clearly stating that the library does not serve the role as parents, a number of parental complaints to the Lincoln Parish Library in Ruston, Louisiana, has led to LGBTQ+ books being pulled from the children’s section of the library.

The books are now only available via parental request.

In November, the library director Vivian McCain, as well as the library’s Board of Directors, began receiving a number of complaints about “LGBTQ items” in their children’s section. The letters had nearly-identical language, and they sought to have the books removed from the children’s shelves and displays.

For the most part, Tom Hanks' family is pretty low-key.

And then there's Tom's son, Chet Hanks (the key.)

Earlier this year, Chet posted a video of himself at the Golden Globes speaking patois, and captioned it, "BIG UP FIMI WHOL FAMILY SOON COM AT DI AWARDS NA SEEN ?? ?? ?? CHUNE IN."

Chet reportedly compared his use of a Jamaican accent to using an English accent after watching "a bunch of English gangster movies," which did not go over well:

In 2018, the Commission said it estimated new HIV patients are growing at a rate of about 80,000 people per year, although that data does not distinguish between people who just contracted the virus or those who may have had it for awhile without knowing.

By comparison, the US reported just under 38,000 new cases in 2018. In 2019, the global number of people newly infected with HIV was 1.7 million people. Those numbers also came at the end of a consistent decline in the number of new global cases over the past decade.

The cases in China affected all demographics, including rapid growth rates in older and teenage populations.

Most of the new cases are spread through sex. The prevalence of sexually transmitted HIV is due to a host of factors, including the public’s general lack of sexual knowledge mixing with the growing proliferation of hook-up apps.

A teenager convicted of raping a child in Indonesia’s most conservative region collapsed during a public whipping that saw him lashed nearly 150 times for violating Islamic law.

The unidentified 19-year-old cried out as a masked officer lashed his back with a rattan stick in the town of Idi Rayeuk in East Aceh on Thursday, according to a report by Agence France Presse.

The teenager was briefly treated by doctors when he pleaded for the caning to stop but the severe punishment continued.

I’m a gay male who has fallen in love with my best friend, who is straight. After months of feeling dishonest in our friendship, I told him how I felt. At first he seemed OK with it. He told me he couldn’t reciprocate those feelings, but he still loved me as his friend and asked me not to make it “weird.”

A month later, he said if I can’t find a way to fall out of love with him, we could no longer be friends. I didn’t change anything about my relationship with him. I maintained the status quo, and he seemed good with it. I don’t know what to do.

I am extremely sad because I don’t want to lose my best friend. We had a great relationship, which is why I thought he would appreciate my honesty and we could work through the issue. What’s your advice? — TURNED DOWN IN TENNESSEE

Two boys who claim to have been kidnapped, beaten, raped and buried alive in a ten-hour ordeal have given their terrifying account of the attack to Swedish police.

The pair described a night of terror that unfolded in a cemetery in the Solna region, north of Stockholm, on August 22 - beginning with an offer of drugs, and ending with them looking like they'd 'showered in blood'.

During the assault, the pair say they were kicked and punched countless times, stabbed, burned, stripped naked and forced to dig their own graves.