Reynolds Price, Daniel Rodriguez Sentenced To 12 Years In Prison For Jack Price Gay Bashing, Maryland Legislators Prepare Plethora Of Same Sex Marriage Bills, Palm Springs Public Sex Sting Defendants Reject Plea Deal, Gawker Names Apple COO Tim Cook As Most Powerful Openly Gay Executive Although He Is Not Really Out

Reynolds Price has died. He was 77. According to his brother, Will, Reynolds died due to complications from a heart attack. Though the New York Times obituary barely mentions it, Price was gay, drafted for military service after graduating from Duke University in 1955 because “he stated, without hesitation, that he was homosexual.” Beyond that, Price was a critical part of the school of modern Southern United States fiction, a descendent of William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Truman Capote.

22 year old Daniel Rodriguez was sentenced Thursday to 12 years in prison for the vicious, unprovoked attack in 2009 on the now 50 year old Jack Price; an attack so violent that Price was hospitalized for three weeks with a broken jaw, broken ribs, and two collapsed lungs, reports the New York Daily News. Rodriguez told the court that “Through the grace of God I hope someday Jack Price will forgive me.” Price, who lost his peripheral vision and hearing in the right ear as a result of attack, cannot work, and recently moved out of state. In a prepared statement, Price told Queens Supreme Court Justice Barry Kron “I need to start a new life because they took my old life from me ... I didn’t deserve this. I cannot understand how anyone could hate me or anybody else this much to cause him this much pain and suffering ... It show how much hate they have inside them.” Rodriguez’s co-defendant, 27 year old Daniel Aleman, was sentenced in December to 8 years in prison.

The Baltimore Sun reports that Friday morning Senate Majority Leader Rob Garagiola introduced the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act, the legislation meant to permit same sex couples to marry but without requiring churches to perform the unions. The House version of that bill is scheduled to be introduced next week by House Majority Leader Kumar Barve. Equality Maryland, the state’s largest gay rights advocacy group, will join both majority leaders Tuesday in Annapolis to promoted passage of both bills. There is yet another bill, the Religious Freedom and Civil Marriage Protection Act, sponsored by Delegate Luiz R.S. Simmons, which although similar in name to the aforementioned bills, appears slightly different. Simmons is a Montgomery County Democrat and a member of the House Judiciary Committee, which will hear the testimony to all of the marriage bills.

The hearing for 15 of the 19 men arrested in connection with the controversial 2009 Warm Sands public sex sting resumed Friday morning, the Desert Sun reporting that the men rejected a plea agreement offered to them Thursday by the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. Defence attorney Joseph Rhea said “The problem I have with this is that it always, ‘Why don’t the gay men roll over and apologize? Why don’t they take a deal or something like good gay guys are supposed to?’ Well, no. We’ve had enough of that. These men were entrapped.” The trial had resumed Thursday after defence attorneys demanded that charges against their clients be dismissed, the defence maintaining that the charges are invalid because Palm Springs police appeared “to be engaging in homophobia rather than focusing on actual crime.” The operation involved an uncover male police officer who acted as a decoy to attract male suspects seeking to engage in public sex acts. 19 men in total were arrested, and charged with misdemeanour lewd conduct in public, and if convicted on that charge, the men would be required by law to register as sex offenders for the remainders of their lives on a database available only to law enforcement officials.

Gawker profiles the presumptive new head of Apple, COO Tim Cook,, and suggests that Cook taking over for CEO Steve Jobs marks “a new era not only for Apple but for gay progress,” although Cook is certainly not known as living the life of an openly gay man, Gawker underlining that Cook “has been reticent to acknowledge his sexual orientation as he has his prowess in overseeing the company supply chain.”