Boy Culture Links: 'Heartstopper: Ending on a Hi' Says Goodbye, Family of Murdered Gay Couple Offers New Insights, Killer Freed, 'I Wanna Be Like You!' Has Dish & Insights + MORE
JULY 9, 2026
TUDUM BY NETFLIX: Heartstopper: Ending on a Hi is a behind-the-scenes special program that celebrates the end of the beloved Heartstopper. With footage from every season and the final film, the cast and all the creative grant special interviews to document the groundbreaking series.
PEOPLE: Some family members of my friends, Zafar and Guillermo — who were abducted and murdered in Mexico — are speaking out to the media about what happened. Though I have been told some things by friends of the family, I did not know some of this. My sense after finding out they disappeared in a car with a contractor was that perhaps they’d been cased for days; I got this impression from watching their social media posts and wondering who might be watching. According to the family members who spoke out, they met the fake contractors a month before they were taken. While it says authorities are working on a motive, it’s clearly money. It’s just such a shame. I hate thinking that forever after, I’ll be running across true-crime stories about them.
THE SS BEN HECHT, BY STEPHEN SILVER: “Why Is Nobody Talking About the Gay Minions in ‘Minions & Monsters’?”
SOUTH FLORIDA SUN SENTINEL: Broward Republican candidate smugly declares being born gay is “impossible.” (Okay, gurl.)
NEW YORK TIMES: Dems have sex-assault allegations, their careers end. Republicans have them, they become president and/or candidates for senator from Texas.
ON WITH KARA SWISHER: Hm. TMZ’s Harvey Levin, who seems to be a Trumper, says he has been off the Trump train since way before his second term, in part because of Trump’s anti-Black bullshit and in part because of his anti-trans bullshit.
EBAR: Craig A. McCarthy, who was in custody since the 2009 stabbing death of retired art dealer Clifford Lambert of Palm Springs, was freed from prison over the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
THE RANDY REPORT: How that gay Atlantis cruise to, er, around Turkey is going.
FIFA: Justin Bieber joins an already crowded FIFA halftime show.
I WANNA BE LIKE YOU!: You’ll love this podcast. Elbi Cespedes chats with highly interesting and accomplished people, here with Jack O’Brien. Jack was a Stephen Sondheim intimate who spent Thanksgiving with him hours before the genius composer’s death: