How Michael Sam Inspired the Great Facebook Kiss-In; HuffingtonPost.com, 5/14/14

Michelangelo Signorile, HuffingtonPost.com; How Michael Sam Inspired the Great Facebook Kiss-In:

"Costello wondered if "the kiss" would be a problem with the other players on the team. This reflected what we've seen in much of the media, some of it coming from much more hostile quarters. People just aren't used to seeing two men or two women kissing, even with all the news coverage of gay marriage. Judging by some of the reactions to the Sam/Cammisano kiss, I'm not sure what they think gay men in relationships do. Play checkers? (Well, maybe sometimes.) We see straight people kissing all the time, all over television, in magazines, in films, on the Internet. A lot of people who consider themselves pro-gay probably are uneasy about seeing gays kissing, just like a lot of people who in the past said they supported interracial marriage were probably uneasy when they saw two straight people of different races kissing (and some still are). And in this case, it's a gay black man and a gay white man kissing.

Mark Joseph Stern wrote a terrific piece on Slate about how all of this means one thing: Gay people need to be kissing more in public. There simply needs to be more queer smooching to desensitize the world.

So with that, I hereby launch the Great Facebook Kiss-In, urging everyone -- whether gay, straight or bi -- to change their profile pics to two women kissing or two men kissing...

Just change your profile pic to a kissing same-sex couple, and urge others to do the same. And for that matter let's do it on Twitter too (and tweet this post with the hashtag #kissin). One day in the future we will look back on all this ridiculousness and laugh. But that's only going to happen if we do exactly this kind of thing a lot. So change those profile photos now."