GLAAD Link: Today's Top LGBT News

Gay and lesbian consumers prefer fuel-efficient cars, account for 5% of new car purchases and have average household income in the six figures—more than that of heterosexual households, according to a recent marketing survey.

So it’s little surprise that General Motors ran a gay-themed advertisement last month for the Chevrolet Volt, the type of car studies show gay and lesbian consumers tend to like.

GM didn’t count on the ad drawing national attention.

Father Bob Pierson, a gay priest in Minnesota, told a group of 200 Catholics last month that they can vote against the amendment that would place a marriage equality ban in the state constitution this November.

Pierson, who belongs to a monastic community at St. John’s University in Collegeville, gave the advice in a speech June 10 at an event in Edina, according to MinnPost. The speech has received more than 30,000 views on YouTube, where Minnesotans United for All Families, the coalition working to defeat the ballot measure, posted it.

In 2009, Abdellah Taïa wrote to his family two years after he became the first Moroccan writer to come out as gay in an interview with the Moroccan magazine Telquel. As the journal Asymptote notes, “Morocco’s biggest-selling newspaper denounced him, and many of the country’s bloggers decried him, saying he should be stoned.”

Wrote Taïa in ‘Homosexuality Explained to My Mother’: