Over on the Huffington Post, a ladyreporter for the house of Ariana has caused a stir with this trend piece on gay college students using wealthy older men, ("Sugar Daddies" in the parlance of our times), to pay for their college tuition. Some are calling it the perfect trend piece (because of how trend pieces are uniformly mediocre), but the activists over at GLAAD aren't taking it lightly. In their response to the article, the anti-defamation group says the author and the subjects she interviewed are playing into "several alarming and dangerous stereotypes about the LGBT community - completely unchalleged."

From GLAAD's open letter to the Huffington Post [emphasis, theirs]:

The author quotes someone as saying these gay students "used the money (from prostitution) to afford the extravagant and often lavish gay lifestyle." While another said, "In the gay scene, all you really have is your age or your money." Fairbanks herself writes, "Unlike in the straight world, many say they find working as an escort on the gay scene to be an accepted, even applauded practice." Another person tells her, "The gay community were really the first to embrace the sugar lifestyle, even more so than the straight community." She interviewed yet another person who told her that he "finds the gay culture more accepting of one-night stands and casual relationships ."

Throughout the article, the author trivializes prostitution, affecting terminology like "sugar daddies," "sugar babies," and "sugar lifestyle."

"This level of carelessness is surprising, given the Huffington Post's track record of commendable coverage of LGBT issues," says Herndon Graddick, Senior Director of Programs at GLAAD. "It feeds into very outdated stereotypes, ignores the broad range of people from our community with many healthy and loving families and uses a few individuals to make sweeping and degrading generalizations about the gay community. It's shoddy journalism."

After reaching out to HuffPo's editorial team, GLAAD got an "inadequate" (and, frankly, kind of awkwardly sexist and homophobic) response:

"Our coverage of students who sell themselves to manage their college debt has aimed to be sympathetic to their plight -- not sensationalistic. But based on our reporting, we found that young women and young gays are part of communities that often view the matter differently. We found that for many gay men, the use of escort services and the exchange of money for sex appear to carry less of a stigma, according to extensive interviews with gay escorts and members of the gay community."

[HuffingtonPost]
[GLAAD]
[TheAwl]