TRAILER: PBS' Out In America

Airing this Wednesday at 8pm nationwide.

TRAILER: Stonewall Uprising

Airing tonight at 9pm on PBS' American Experience:

When police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in the Greenwich Village section of New York City on June 28, 1969, the street erupted into violent protests that lasted for the next six days. The Stonewall riots, as they came to be known, marked a major turning point in the modern gay civil rights movement in the United States and around the world.

Read more about the documentary.

Gay Twin Jugglers

From tomorrow's debut episode of Circus on PBS.

(Tipped by JMG reader Chev)

Rep. Doug Lamborn: Kill Sesame Street

Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-CO) has proposed legislation that will end federal funding for PBS. Because times are too tough to pay for Sesame Street.

Lamborn says that with increased government deficits, funding for programs like Sesame Street, for example, is not a priority. "Programs that are of good quality, people are going to support," he argues. "Why should taxpayers, when we're running trillion-dollar annual deficits, have to pay for something like this that can pay for itself?" It is estimated the taxpayer cost to fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2010 will equal $420 million. Bill Wilson, president of Americans for Limited Government, concurs with Lamborn's sentiment. "This is a total luxury in the sense that this is not something people can't get other places," says Wilson. "And clearly, there isn't enough of a market for it. If there were, it wouldn't need government taxpayer money to pay its salaries and pay for its overhead."

PBS gets 15-20 percent of its total budget from the federal government.

The Dancing Boys Of Afghanistan

From PBS Frontline's new documentary:

In Afghanistan today, in the midst of war and endemic poverty, an ancient tradition--banned when the Taliban were in power--has re-emerged across the country. It's called Bacha Bazi, translated literally as "boy play." Hundreds of boys, some as young as eleven, street orphans or boys bought from poor families by former warlords and powerful businessmen, are dressed in woman's clothes, taught to sing and dance for the entertainment of male audiences, and then sold to the highest bidder or traded among the men for sex. With remarkable access inside a Bacha Bazi ring operating in Northern Afghanistan, Najibullah Quraishi, an Afghan journalist, investigates this practice, still illegal under Afghan law, talking with the boys, their families, and their masters, exposing the sexual abuse and even murders of the boys, and documenting how Afghan authorities responsible for stopping these crimes are sometimes themselves complicit in the practice.

The program aired Tuesday night and can be viewed online here.