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This article originally appeared on January 24, 2018

Kara Coley, a bartender at Sipps in Gulfport, Mississippi, got an unusual phone call on the job last week.

“Good evening,” Coley answered. “Thank you for calling Sipps!”

A woman on the other end of the line asked, “Is this a gay bar?”

Sipps welcomes everyone, Coley explained to her, but indeed attracts a mostly LGBTQ crowd.

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“Can I ask you a question?” the caller followed up. “Are you gay?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Coley said.

Then things got interesting.

“What was the one thing you wanted from your parents when you came out?” the woman continued.

Coley, who’s tended bar for about 17 years, was a little caught off guard. In all her years of experience fielding requests and helping others working in the service industry, she’d never received a question like that.

“My son just came out to me,” the woman continued on the other end of the line. “And I don’t want to say anything that may mess him up in the head.”

Coley thought for a moment. Then she asked the woman if she accepted her son for who he is.

The woman answered “yes.”

“You should definitely let him know that you love and accept him!” Coley said. “I think everything will be OK from there!”

The woman thanked Coley for her input and they parted ways.

Later that night, in the early hours of Jan. 19, Coley decided to post the entire interaction to her Facebook page, noting how “random” it all had been.

In the days following, her post went viral, amassing over 1,500 likes and hundreds of shares.

So I got the most random phone call at the bar tonight! 😀Me:Good evening Thankyou for calling Sipps!Lady on phone: Is…
Posted by Kara Coley on Friday, January 19, 2018

The post’s comment section soon filled with love and gratitude for Coley’s simple but endearing answer.

“My heart is truly touched by this,” one Facebook user wrote. “A parent wanting to support correctly, and a beautiful response. This is progress. This is love and acceptance in the rawest form.”

“Kara, this old granny lesbian is so grateful for you, and for a parent that thought outside the box to get advice!” another user chimed in. “Keep being you!”

“[The response] has been amazing,” Coley writes. She believes her post struck a chord with friends and strangers alike because people are looking for encouraging news: “Every day people wake up and there’s so much negativity in the world — people just need a breath of fresh air!”

For parents to an LGBTQ child, it’s still vital to understand the facts too, Coley noted: “Educate yourself [on LGBTQ issues] and do a little research.”

Ideally, parents should have access to better resources than their local gay bar when it comes to getting help with LGBTQ parenting. At the end of the day, though, the best thing you can do as a parent is make sure your kid understands you’re there through thick and thin.

“Just knowing you have someone in your corner takes a little weight off your shoulders,” Coley wrote.

Learn more about being a good ally as a parent of an LGBTQ child at PFLAG (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). If you’re a young LGBTQ person who needs help, resources are available at The Trevor Project.

This article originally appeared on 06.20.18

Studies show that having daughters makes men more sympathetic to women’s issues.

And while it would be nice if men did not need a genetic investment in a female person in order to gain this perspective, lately I’ve had sympathy for those newly woke dads.

My two sons have caused something similar to happen to me. I’ve begun to glimpse the world through the eyes of a young male. And among the things I’m finding here in boyland are the same obnoxious gender norms that rankled when I was a girl.

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Of course, one notices norms the most when they don’t fit. If my tween sons were happily boy-ing away at boy things, neither they nor I would notice that they were hemmed in.

But oh boy, are they not doing that.

In fact, if I showed you a list of my sons’ collective interests and you had to guess their gender, you’d waver a bit, but then choose girl.

Baking, reading, drawing, holidays, films, volleyball, cute mammals, video games, babies and toddlers, reading, travel, writing letters.

I imagine many of you are thinking at this point: That’s awesome that your boys are interested in those things!

There’s more. One loves comics and graphic novels but gravitates to stories with strong female protagonists, like Ms. Marvel and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

Cool! I love it.

And sports. They are thoroughly bored by team sports. They don’t play them. They won’t watch them. They will up- or down-arrow through any number of sporting events on TV to get to a dance contest or to watch competitive baking.

So? Nothing wrong with that.

Those are the kinds of things all my progressive friends say.

But it’s often not the message my sons themselves hear from the other adults in their lives, their classmates, and the media.

For example, the first get-to-know-you question they are inevitably asked by well-meaning grown-ups is, “So, do you play sports?” When they say, “No, not really,” the adult usually continues brightly, “Oh, so what do you like to do, then?”

No one explicitly says it’s bad for a boy not to play sports. But when it’s always the first question asked, the implication is clear: playing sports is normal; therefore, not playing them is not.

The truth is that one of them does play a sport. He figure skates, as does my daughter. When people find out that she skates, they beam at her, as if she suddenly has possession of a few rays of Olympic glory. In the days before my son stopped telling people that he ice skates, most of them hesitated and then said, “Oh, so you are planning to play hockey?”

But it’s not just what people say. It’s all those pesky, unwritten rules. When he was in second grade, my younger son liked the Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew series. But he refused to check any out of the school library. He explained: “Girls can read boy books, but boys can’t read girl books. Girls can wear boy colors or girl colors, but boys can only wear boy colors. Why is that, Mom?”

I didn’t have an answer.

An obvious starting point — and the one that we have the most control over — is to change the way we speak to the boys in our lives.

As Andrew Reiner suggests in a spot-on essay, we should engage boys in analytical, emotion-focused conversations, just like we do with girls. In “How to Talk to Little Girls,” Lisa Bloom offers alternatives to the appearance-focused comments so often directed at young girls: asking a girl what she’s reading or about current events or what she would like to see changed in the world. I could copy-paste Bloom’s list and slap a different title on it: “How to Ask Boys About Something Besides Sports.”

And with a few more built-in nudges, we might expand the narrow world of boyhood more quickly. Boy Scouts could offer badges for developing skills in child care, teamwork, and journaling. Girl-dominated activities like art, dance, gymnastics, and figure skating could be made more welcoming to boys, with increased outreach and retention efforts. My son could write his own essay about trying to fit in to the nearly all-girl world of figure skating, including the times he has had to change clothes in a toilet stall at skating events because there were no locker rooms available for boys.

I used to think that the concept of gender — of “girl things” and “boy things” — was what was holding us back.

Now I see it differently.

The interdependent yin and yang of gender is a fundamental part of who we are, individually and collectively. We need people who like to fix cars and people who like to fix dinner. We need people who are willing and able to fight if needed and people who are exquisitely tuned into a baby’s needs. But for millennia, we have forced these traits to align with biological sex, causing countless individuals to be dissatisfied and diminished. For the most part, we’ve recognized this with girls. But we have a long way to go when it comes to boys. As Gloria Steinem observed, “We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons … but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.”

I acknowledge that young boys feeling pressured to be sports fans is not our country’s biggest problem related to gender.

Transgender individuals still confront discrimination and violence. The #MeToo movement has revealed to anyone who didn’t already know it that girls and women can’t go about their everyday lives without bumping into male sexual aggression.

But if our culture shifts to wholeheartedly embrace the whole spectrum of unboyishness, it may play some small role in addressing these other issues, too. Male culture will be redefined, enriched, and expanded, diluting the toxic masculinity that is at the root of most of our gender-related problems.

Boys and girls alike will be able to decide if they would rather be made up of snips and snails, sugar and spice, or a customized mix. And my future grandsons, unlike my sons, won’t think twice about wearing pink or reading about a girl detective at school.

This story originally appeared on Motherwell and is reprinted here with permission.

This article originally appeared on 02.26.20

Double H Canine Academy in Louisville, Kentucky is a place where dog owners can take their rambunctious pets and have them turned into respectable members of the family.

However, as you can tell in this hilarious video, not all dogs are meant to follow orders.

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Ladies and gentleman, meet Ryker.

Double H Canine Training Academy… Epic Service Dog Training Failure

Ryker giving it his all before flunking our of Service Dog Training School

As you can see below, Ryker is living his life to the fullest. While he may never be the world’s greatest service dog, he continues to provide an invaluable testament to being true to one’s self.

RYKER “The Purpose Driven Dog”🐕……..

In his second performance on the Saturday Night Live stage tonight, Jack White delivered an intimate performance of “A Tip From You To Me” from his album, Entering Heaven Alive

While on stage, White was dressed to the nines in a black shirt accessorized with suspenders, as he once again, showed off his smooth guitar chops. While this song is a rather slow, stripped-down one, White maintained an electrifying presence.

Between the two albums White released last year — Fear Of The Dawn and Entering Heaven Alive — this song is one of the more emotional in the collection. In an interview with Esquire, White revealed how he found solace in solitude during the creative process for both albums.

“Part of it was me being holed up in Kalamazoo with just acoustic guitar and piano,” White said. “I knew, I’m not going to be writing electric guitar riffs, it’s going to be creating songs from nothing. I’m in a room with no inspiration. I’m not reading the Internet every day. I’m not reading newspapers, watching television—I was just in a room by myself. And pulling out phrases and words, here, to trigger things and writing things down that might lead me down a path.”

You can watch the performance above.

Tonight marks the fifth time Jack White has appeared on Saturday Night Live, as well as that for this episode’s host, Woody Harrelson. In his first performance of the night, White performed “Taking Me Back” and “Fear Of The Dawn”

During the performance, White rocked out with an electric guitar and support from an equally pumped backing band. The stage was illuminated in shades of electric blue, matching White’s guitar. White jumped up and down and danced throughout the stage, maintaining his energy as “Taking Me Back” smoothly transitioned into “Fear Of The Down.”

The song comes from Fear Of The Dawn, the first of two albums White released last year. In an interview with Variety last year, White explained his decision to release two separate albums, explaining that he felt the songs he recorded didn’t seem to flow together well as he was trying to put together a singular, cohesive project.

“No matter how much I tried to make a sequence out of the songs, it just seemed like you were taking a Miles Davis record and putting it in the middle of an Iron Maiden record,” he said. “It had an ‘Oh, that’s interestingly jarring thing’ to it, but it wasn’t breathing or flowing.”

You can watch the performance above.

Joel Embiid hit the most incredible shot of the 2022-23 NBA season at the end of Saturday night’s showdown between the Philadelphia 76ers and the Boston Celtics. The only problem for the Sixers star was that the ball didn’t quite leave his hand in time, and as a result, Boston was able to pick up a thrilling 110-107 win.

The Celtics stormed back from a 15-point deficit in the third quarter, took the lead, and went up by as many as 10 points in the fourth. But the Sixers had a response, and over the game’s final two minutes, the teams passed the lead back and forth to one another. After a Jayson Tatum put Boston up by four with a minute left to play, Philly managed to get to the free throw line four times, made all of them, and sandwiched them around a crucial stop to tie things up in the waning moments.

With a hair over one second left, Tatum hit a three off of an inbounds play that looked like it was going to be enough. And then, PJ Tucker inbounded the ball to Embiid, who took a dribble, launched from the free throw line, and sent the Wells Fargo center into a frenzy.

You can see that Embiid just missed getting this out of his hand by about a half second, and even Embiid seemed to know this was too little, too late. The referees reviewed this and quickly determined Embiid didn’t get it off in time, which gave Boston the win.

New music from Young Nudy is coming soon. Yesterday (February 24), the rapper took to Instagram to reveal the cover art and tracklist for his food-themed album, Gumbo.

Gumbo boasts a hefty tracklisting that reads like a list of ingredients. It appears Nudy was also joined by some collaborators, who helped him cook up something great. Joining him in the kitchen are Key Glock, and 21 Savage, who is actually Nudy’s cousin.

Over the years, Nudy has garnered a large fan base and an online following, though, in an interview with XXL last year, he admitted he doesn’t spend too much time online.

“I ain’t gon’ cap to ya. The only way I knew my fan base growing, when I do a show,” Nudy said. “Other than that, trying to go from the internet and sh*t, I don’t really be getting it, because I be seeing rappers that got a million followers and sh*t, and they can’t even get 100,000 likes. And, I know I be getting them muthaf*ckas, and I ain’t got no bots or no fake sh*t. I got real Nudy fans. I feel like my fan base is slowly growing.”

You can see the cover art and tracklist below.

1. “Brussel Sprout”
2. “Pancake”
3. “Portabella”
4. “Pot Roast” feat. Key Glock
5. “M.R.E.”
6. “McChicken”
7. “Okra”
8. “Peaches & Eggplants” feat. 21 Savage
9. “Shrimp”
10. “Duck Meat”
11. “Fish & Chips”
12. “Hot Grease”
13. “Passion Fruit”

Gumbo is out 2/28 via RCA.

TMZ is reporting that Billie Eilish was granted a temporary restraining order against a man who was allegedly caught lurking outside of her Los Angeles home.

In documents obtained by the publication, a judge ordered the alleged stalker, whose name is Raymond Black, to stay at least 100 years away from Eilish and her house. Black was also reportedly ordered to stay away from the house of Eilish’s parents.

According to the documents, the restraining order was granted based on what the judge described as “a credible threat of violence or stalking.”

This past Monday, Eilish reportedly came home to find Black standing outside of her living room without a shirt on, staring directly at her through the glass window..

Eilish called the police, who reportedly arrested Black nearby the property.

Even more terrifying, Eilish apparently told the cops that she reviewed security footage captured by her cameras earlier in the day, and saw that Black had been walking around her property, took off his clothes, and used her outdoor shower.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only time she’s had to deal with stalkers. Last month, Eilish was granted a five-year restraining order against a 39-year-old man accused of breaking into her parents’ Los Angeles home.

Gracie Abrams‘ long-awaited debut album Good Riddance is finally here. To celebrate its release this past Friday (February 24), Abrams stopped by Jimmy Kimmel Live! to perform “I Know It Won’t Work” from the album.

On the song, Abrams expresses her desire to rekindle a past romance but is forced to come to terms with the fact that the two aren’t meant to be.

“And part of me wants to walk away ’til you really listen / I hate to look at your face and know that we’re feelin’ different / ‘Cause part of me wants you back, but / I know it won’t work like that,” sings Abrams on the song’s chorus.

During the performance, the stage is lit black and white, as Abrams is joined by a live band, giving the punchy pop track an even more raw feel.

Self-awareness is a common theme on Good Riddance. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Abrams said she wanted to display a sense of maturity and accountability in her newer material.

“I think a lot of my songwriting in the past almost placed blame on others before reflecting on my own role in a situation,” said Abrams. “With Good Riddance, I wanted to grow out of that really desperately…. I wanted to be more thoughtful and more accountable.”

Good Riddance is out via Interscope. You can pre-save it here.

One of the best college basketball games of the season took place on Saturday evening when the 7th-ranked Arizona Wildcats played host to their in-state rivals, the Arizona State Sun Devils. Things came down to the last possible moment, when Desmond Cambridge Jr. threw up a prayer from beyond halfcourt that got answered and give the Sun Devils a gigantic win.

A pair of free throws by Azuolas Tubelis gave Arizona a lead early in the second half, and for the remainder of the game, Arizona State played catch up. They kept chipping away, and with just under two minutes left, the Sun Devils took an 84-83 lead, which the two teams would pass back and forth for the rest of the game. And with 29 seconds left, the sequence that looked like it was going to decide the winner happened, as Pelle Larsson hit a layup to put the Wildcats up by one, DJ Horne missed a jumper on the way back down, and Oumar Ballo split a pair of free throws to give Arizona an 88-86 advantage.

On the ensuing inbound with about three seconds left, Cambridge got the ball, dribbled once, and decided to put up a shot before the defense could get in a position to contest. It could not have been any more different, and while the crowd at McKale Memorial Center was stunned, the Sun Devils ran onto the floor to celebrate their 89-88 win.

With the win, Arizona State moved to 20-9 on the year with an 11-7 mark in conference play.