Joel Burns and Lawrence O’Donnell, via Facebook

Your weekday morning blend from Instant Tea:

1. Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns and Bianca “Nikki” Peet, a student at Corpus Christi’s Flour Bluff High School, were among those honored Sunday night during the 22nd Annual GLAAD Media Awards in Los Angeles. Burns, husband J.D. Angle and MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell accepted the award for Outstanding TV Journalism Segment, for their interview on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell. Meanwhile, the 17-year-old Peet received a Special Recognition Award for her efforts to organize a Gay Straight Alliance at her school. We’ll post more photos from the event as soon as they are available.

2. Who would have thought Oklahoma would be home to the first transgender person elected to lead a statewide Young Democrats group? Trans attorney Brittany Novotny, who challenged bigoted State Rep. Sally Kern in November, on Saturday was elected president of Young Democrats of Oklahoma.

3. Two firefighters in Victoria, Texas have been fired for creating a montage of photos of nude men that was posted at their station. According to The Victoria Advocate, the montage included a scantily clad crotch shot, a shot of one nude man kissing another nude man’s body, a cartoon of two men kissing, a shot of one nude man looming over another with his hands on his shoulders, a bare-chested man,  a shot of a man’s scantly clad rear end, and face shots of two Hollywood actors. The city isn’t releasing details of the incident, other than to say that the employees violated the city’s conduct policy. One expert noted that the incident could be an example of anti-gay harrassment:

“Sometimes in a case where straight people harass homosexual people, it may be an attempt to create an ‘us’ and ‘them’ separation; a clumsy or immature attempt to demonstrate their own ‘straightness’ through not-so-subtle intimidation,” University of Houston-Victoria criminal justice professor Casey Akins told the newspaper. “Straight on gay harassment is under-reported and when it is reported, it is often not necessarily classified as ‘sexual harassment in the workplace.”