One way to keep updated about milkboys is following us on Twitter. If you don’t like Twitter you can use one of the many alternatives to Google Reader. Quite a few people seem to like Feedly, personally I prefer The Old Reader. Some other companies, like Digg, have also announced that they’re working on a feed reader so there are probably some more going live very soon. Let us know in the comments if you know any other good alternatives.

milkboys on the other hand is still kicking after five years, making it one of the longest-serving queer youth blogs around :) And of course there are presents to celebrate this! Milo and Dumbledore, two idols of recent milkboys history, kind as they are, provide you with some photos made for the occasion (click on them!).

And we’ll give away a classic (red) milkboys shirt to a random reader leaving a comment under this post. We’ll get in touch with the winner by mail; bonus points if you post a milk(boys)-related photo of yourself with your comment (You can use sites like imgur top host the photo)

We will also, finally, release some updates and new projects many of you were waiting for over the next couple of weeks, so grab some milk & cookies, keep your eyes open and stay fab!

Don’t miss these two on Tumblr! Milo got one here and Dumbledore here!

Let me also use this opportunity to give you a quick update about milkboys in general: The music and the video sites are still coming, working on them took longer because there were a couple of things coming up in my life I didn’t expect a year ago (only good things, no worries ). Along with these we’ll update the forums which, among other things, means a better gallery and a mobile chat.

The vast majority of these nasty comments are deleted before they get published or shortly thereafter but we can’t babysit the site 24/7 so the bad stuff you see slipping through every now and then should give you an idea about the unseen amount of hateful remarks not getting through.

I can’t stress the fact enough that more often than you might think the people we feature here actually happen to read the comments left by the readers of this blog. The dad of diving talent Jordan Pisey Windle being just the latest example.

And the same way you wouldn’t walk up to a stranger on the street to tell them how you hate their haircut/body shape/skin colour etc. we ask you to be respectful around here. That you can be somewhat anonymous on the internet doesn’t mean you can be an asshat to everyone.

You would think that people who are part of a minority that is often disrespected and discriminated against would be careful not to repeat the injustice they have to endure. So please be aware that we have rules about leaving comments. This place could be a lot more helpful and supportive for many people if everyone would acknowledge them.

Poll: Who was your favourite act at the Eurovision Song Contest 2012?

In case of the former you should understand the “Trap” in the post title in the classical sense: People who are easily mistaken for their “opposite” gender (I put opposite in quotation marks because the whole purpose of these posts is to show that something like hard-coded genders don’t exist and don’t matter because eventually all that matters is that you think a person is beautiful and if you can’t even tell if someone is a boy or a girl or something in-between… why bothering caring then?)

Transgendered people on the other hand aren’t traps since a transgender boy actually is a boy and a transgender girl is a girl, regardless of the gender they were assigned at birth.

So if you see a transgendered person posted as Trap Thursday this doesn’t mean anyone wants to imply they want to trap someone. In these cases please understand “Trap” as “trapped in the wrong body” (when it’s someone who didn’t have sex reassignment surgery yet or doesn’t want to have it) or “having escaped the trap of a wrong body” (when it’s someone who had sex reassignment surgery). OK? :)

We’ve also updated the milkboys header image for the occasion (if you can’t see it try pressing CTRL + F5). And, slightly off.-topic, while I was already tinkering with the design of the blog I changed the colour of links in posts to a brighter red since some people mentioned that they were to hard to distinguish from normal text.