Today’s Salt Lake Tribune Rolly & Wells column includes this:

Bribe Keeps Gays Out of Kiss Contest

A kissing contest at Murray’s Fashion Place Mall on Friday night could have become controversial had a local radio station not been savvy in the art of the bribe.

To the dismay of Star 102.7 (KQMB-FM), two men wanted to enter the “Lip-Lockin’ for McLachlan” contest, in which couples competed in a kissing marathon to win front-row tickets to a Sarah McLachlan concert at the E Center.

The station could not legally prevent them from entering the contest, and mall officials had no objection to them competing. But Star’s program director Mickey Nelson told the men the station is “family friendly,” and if they agreed not to participate, Nelson would give them six tickets to the McLachlan show. The men accepted the offer.

The contest proceeded with 11 heterosexual couples. The winning couple locked lips without a break for an hour and three minutes, which apparently met Star’s “family friendly” standards.

Dammit, people! You know how much I love being referred to as “gays.”

Gay should only be an adjective, not a noun. Fuck Webster. It sounds stupid and condescending to say, “the gays.” Can you imagine a newspaper printing a story about “the straights?”

Anyway, funny how the newspaper story is just a wee bit different than what really happened.

I never spoke to the program director (it’s actually MIKEY Nelson, by the way), only Karli, the promotion director. Mikey Nelson wasn’t even there when the “negotiation” took place. Plus, Karli was pretty clear at the time that the radio station had no problem—it was the mall, she said, which is the complete opposite of what the mall AND the radio station told the newspaper yesterday.

My guess is Fashion Place threatened to pull all their radio advertising from Star if the mall took any bad publicity for the incident, so rather than lose a major client’s revenue, Star sucked it up and took all the blame. Regardless, somebody lied, either to me on Friday or to the newspaper yesterday.

At least another local radio station, X96, nominated Star as a “Boner of the Day,” for being so homophobic.