From a Knight-Ridder advance piece:

Disney's newest Cinderella passes multicultural muster with flying colors. The title role belongs to singer-actress Brandy [who is black] ... Her prince is Paolo Montalban, a newcomer of Hispanic descent. Milk-skinned Bernadette Peters has the role of the wicked stepmother whose two haughty daughters are played by white and black actresses. Whitney Houston is the fairy godmother, Jason Alexander [is] ... the Prince's loyal steward, Lionel, and Whoopi Goldberg gets to be Queen Constantina.

We hope that this Cinderella, as we approach the millennium, is reflective of what our society is today.

[Ed.: It is. Paolo Montalban is Filipino, so Disney has not forgotten Asians.]

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Following the recent tobacco deal, which would require an exemption from the antitrust laws the Federal Trade Commission administers, FTC chairman Robert Pitofsky worriedly commented that the exemption "would allow the tobacco companies to coordinate their behavior and raise prices far in excess of levels necessary to cover the annual payments and keep the extra profits for themselves." In fact, the whole point of the deal is to raise prices so that fewer people smoke tobacco.

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A teach-in was held in New York, led by Sex Panic, a group formed as a result of heated ideological debate between gays and queers that pitted the value of gay male promiscuity against the dangers of HIV transmission. Self-described "queer" academic radicals held the teach-in out of frustration with increasingly mainstream gay leaders and journalists (Gabriel Rotello and Andrew Sullivan in particular) who counseled sexual responsibility and monogamous behavior in the face of AIDS. Epidemiologists had determined that despite aggressive campaigns to promote condom use, roughly a third of gay men continued to have unprotected anal sex with a variety of partners. Queers seek to remove stigma from all sexual practice and resent the advancement of an exclusively gay identity, which they believe maintains a marginalized culture as confining as homophobia itself.

Caleb Crain describes the scene in Lingua Franca, October, 1997:

During the question-and-answer period after the teach-in, a man stood up to announce he was "what is known under Megan's Law as a sexually dangerous predator," jailed for four years for having sex with underage boys and now tracked by the police. He was met with a silence that was both stunned and respectful.... No one in the room either seconded or reproached him....

At the very end of the evening, another man stood up and falteringly said that he felt the gay community's celebration of multipartner sex made it more difficult for him to maintain an exclusive, long-term relationship. He was interrupted and heckled—the only instance of either behavior during the teach-in. Someone in the audience cattily suggested that the man join Sexual Compulsives Anonymous....

The Advocate later published a profile of San Diego "sex activist" and HIV-positive gay porn star Tony Valenzuela, who organized the Sex Panic Summit. Declaring his preference for unprotected sex with multiple partners, Valenzuela noted that he had slept with 150 men the previous year and that he had failed to use condoms about a third of the time. "Sex with a condom is artificial sex," he said. Commenting on the risk he was exposing others to in the face of a second wave of the AIDS epidemic, Valenzuela explained that while gay men should try to stay uninfected, "health isn't only biological. Health is psychological, emotional, and erotic. We're so one-dimensional when it comes to health, saying that it has to be biological survival."

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