Murder, models, Malaysia and MySpace

a news compendium

with a gay bias
issue 83 | January 2011 | FREE

<<< Sacha M'Baye is jaw-dropping in this shot from Wonderland magazine. He was lensed by Xevi Muntané. More manikins later.

But first... 

>>> Portuguese journalist and gay activist Carlos Castro found tortured and murdered in New York City hotel. His male model companion, Renato Seabra, a recent contestant on a Portuguese reality TV show, castrated him with a wine corkscrew before finally killing him "to get rid of Castro's homosexual demons". More on this story here.

||| Two gay heroes thwart assassinations - what a difference 35 years make.

||| The Westboro Baptist church won't be permitted to picket the funerals of the Arizona shooting victims.

>>> A son confronts gender identity and a mother grieves. Sharon Weir may not be happy that her son is openly gay and identifies himself as transgender, but she will fight for his right to exist in peace.

US & CANADA

<<< Generation gap imperils gay church. The Joy Metropolitan Community Church in Orlando is imperiled by its inability to attract a younger generation of GBLT worshipers.

>>> Black church bigots oppose anti-homophobia billboard.

<<< This is absolutely heartbreaking: "The first black-owned gay bar in New York City and one of the oldest black gay bars in the United States", the Starlite Lounge, which closed last year, has been turned into mobile phone shop. From Brownstoner: "One of Brooklyn's oldest gay bars and its first black-owned gay bar is just another soulless storefront devoid of its past life."

<<< The GLBT History Museum - America's first museum dedicated to GBLT history - has opened in San Francisco. Facebook gallery of pictures here.

||| Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Problem isn't gays, it's bigots. "I'll never know how many homosexuals I served with. Two for sure. The first one left the service after graduating top of his class from tech school, discharged for voluntarily disclosing his sexuality. The other came out to me after I'd known him for a bit. By the time he told me he was gay, I already knew. We ALL knew. How? Well, while the rest of us were talking about sex, he never talked about it. Ever. See, if public discussion of sexuality is a problem, it is OUR problem. We heterosexuals just can't shut up about it."

||| The Facebook for GBLT military personnel.

||| Gay sports bars proliferate as growth in disposable income fuels profits.

||| Museum of Censored Art launched. "Two men who were ejected and banned for life from the Smithsonian last month for protesting the censorship of a video piece from a gay exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery say they plan to set up a Museum of Censored Art in a trailer parked outside the building." More.

||| Palm Springs police chief ousted - for homophobia.

<<< This is Cornelius Dupree Jr., who served 30 years for rape and robbery committed in 1979. He has finally been exonerated by DNA evidence. Dupree was twice offered the chance to cut short his sentence, on the condition he admitted his guilt.

||| Parent One, Parent Two to replace references to mother, father on passport forms.

||| More on 5-year-old "Princess Boy" Dyson Kilodavis. We first heard about Dyson and his amazing family back in October.

>>> Nature, not nurture! Born This Way is a blog that encourages readers to "submit pictures from their childhood that capture them showing the beginnings of their innate LGBT selves."

<<< Travon Free: I am bisexual. More here.

||| CANADA: Damage to Xtra Vancouver newspaper boxes a possible hate crime.

||| CANADA: Why is Ontario funding an anti-gay school system?

||| First Mark Twain, now Mark Knopfler: The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council bans the Dire Straits song Money for Nothing, citing its use of the word "faggot."

UK

>>> A very Soho tale of a naked priest, a gay sailor twink, and a gay RAF serviceman.

<<< More on the phenomenon of straight boys kissing: 89% of students polled were happy to kiss another man on the lips through friendship, and almost 40% had engaged in "sustained kissing, initially for shock value, but now just for 'a laugh'."

||| Poor white boys score worse grades than deprived black, Chinese and Asian classmates.

||| BBC Newsnight guest calls Australian cricket team "poofters". BBC fails to challenge remark or offer an apology.

||| BBC coverage of Elton's baby provokes claims of homophobia - gay rights campaigners urge viewers to boycott licence fee in protest.

||| Whatever we think of the couple acquiring a baby, you can't argue with this: "Elton John and David Furnish are about to give an affluent, loving home to a baby that need not have been born at all. That same home and same love were offered to a child who's growing up in an orphanage, with HIV, amid who knows what kind of emotional and physical deprivation. Just another bit of good denied to the world, by people in power who think they know best."

<<< Ibis international hotel group is hosting anti-gay Islamic hate preachers this weekend.

>>> The extraordinary life and death of David Burgess. "Last October, detectives were called to investigate the death of a woman under a London tube train. But as they traced her final moments, they discovered that she was, in fact, David Burgess, one of the most brilliant immigration lawyers of his generation. Here, Burgess's family and friends tell, for the first time, the complicated story of the loving father, brilliant colleague, sensitive woman and courageous person they knew."

<<< The Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive - the UK's only national independent GBLT news archive - moves to London.

||| From the BBC Archive, Male Homosexual, first broadcast in January 1965 - two years before the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales - gay men discuss "their problem".

EUROPE

>>> SPAIN: City Council of Madrid takes action against Madrid Gay Pride "for causing alarming noise levels, with serious deterioration of the environment, and with the aggravating circumstance of recidivism in the residential area of Chueca as a result of the activities organized by them, within the said event."

<<< CZECH REPUBLIC: Prague becoming Europe's new gay-friendly capital...

||| ...And those nice Czechs have even developed a map just for us!

||| HUNGARY: Who will confront the hatred in Hungary? "The European Union seems happy to ignore the repression that is happening under Viktor Orbán."

||| NETHERLANDS: Dutch gays come out in reality series Out of the Closet, made by Dutch Roman Catholic broadcaster KRO. Story has video.

||| TURKEY: Court orders closure of another GBLT organisation.

>>> RUSSIA: Chernobyl - 24 years on. In pictures.

AMERICAS

<<< BRAZIL: Gay brothers confess to burying their father alive.

||| JAMAICA: Standing up for human rights. "As Caricom citizens, we are proud that a majority of Caribbean nations stood up in the United Nations General Assembly on December 22 and voted together, in the words of the Rwanda delegation, to 'recognise that ... people (of different sexual orientation) continue to be the target of murder in many of our societies, and they are more at risk than many ... other groups'."

||| HONDURAS: Another GBLT person is brutally murdered.

||| HAITI: Aerial photos showing Port-au-Prince before and after the earthquake one year ago.

>>> HAITI: One year on, in pictures.

AFRICA

||| ZIMBABWE: Frank Malaba, the first Zimbabwean actor to come out has announced his engagement to South African boyfriend Lee Lucas Strydom, below.

||| UGANDA: The country's top opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, says the country's police have more pressing tasks than investigating homosexuality: "This is something that is done in the privacy of people's rooms, between consenting adults." He is challenging President Yoweri Museveni in elections to be held next month.

||| Ugandans win damages over anti-gay newspaper article. "High court says Rolling Stone article violated constitutional rights to privacy and safety."

||| Box Turtle Bulletin has the text of the ruling.

||| We are free to be gay in Uganda – for the moment. "The ban on the outing of homosexuals in Uganda's media is a victory for human rights. But the anti-homosexuality bill, still under parliamentary discussion, means we can't give up the fight."

||| GHANA: A history of homosexuality in Ghana: "Homosexuality became known when tourists, international workers and even missionaries flooded the country in the 70s. Those within the group who were homosexuals invited innocent boys to their houses, flushed them with gifts and money and promised to send them to the rich countries. This was one of the ways they used to have anal intercourse with the innocent boys. This continued and most of them became addicted to it."

<<< IVORY COAST: Werk it, gurl! Werk! A rebel soldier wearing the opposite of camouflage clothing.

ASIA PACIFIC

||| Nepal throws open its doors to gay tourists.

>>> PHILIPPINES: The annual procession of the Feast of Black Nazarene in Manila.

||| MALAYSIA: Islamic department "powerless to act" against Azwan Ismail, who came out in an online video over Christmas.

||| MALAYSIA: Hafidz Baharom, a Malay-Muslim social commentator comes out as gay in a column in The Malaysian Insider, in support of Azwan Ismail whose appearance in a It Gets Better video sparked furore in the predominantly Muslim country.

||| MALAYSIA: GBLT are Malaysians too, and they do vote.

<<< SOUTH KOREA: Soldiers participate in cold endurance training - and it's hot!

||| INDIA: Partying undercover. Why Delhi's GBLT community is partying in small towns away from the city.

||| INDIA: Now Delhi gets its own dedicated gay shops.

>>> PAKISTAN: Handicapped are children buried in healing ritual during eclipse.

MIDDLE EAST

||| ISRAEL: Lesbians really do have it easier.

||| Human Rights Watch - "the world's most prestigious human rights organisation" - "scorches" Iran over anti-gay violence.

||| BRUNEI: Men pay as much as $400 for sex with other men.

<<< Learn about "hummus queens" and dirty Arabic, and how "in Dubai, everyone is bisexual." Yes, there's a lot of gay Arabs out there.

BODY & MIND

||| Young gays have as many friends and are just as popular and socially connected as other teenagers. But the composition of their friendships is somewhat different: "Gay teenagers tend to go out of their way to befriend youths of other races or those who are stigmatized for their looks."

||| Long term relationships are the key to good health, boffins claim.

||| Watching television for more than four hours a day doubles the risk of heart disease and premature death - no matter how much exercise you do.

>>> Why crying is a big turn off for men...

||| ...And longterm readers of ka-os|theory might recall this Guest Spot feature, where Forbidden Light wrote about, "Watching this grown man cry stimulated me in an unexpected way."

||| Saturated fat may not always be harmful.

ZOOLOGY

<<< Animal pictures of the week (20 more pictures). Left, an obese orang-utan at Taman Safari Park near Jakarta, Indonesia.

>>> Squirrel monkeys keep warm on a radiator at a zoo in Qingdao city, eastern China's Shandong province.

PLANET

||| Secret Abu Dhabi weather project create more than 50 man-made rainstorms.

WEB & GADGETS

||| Software coming that could wipe embarrassing pictures from the web?

<<< MySpace to sack most of its international workforce ahead of an expected sale.

||| MySpace: Is this the beginning of the end?

||| MySpace: How it compares to its rivals.

||| MySpace: The strange culture of MySpace's Facebook fan page.

>>> Firefox replaces Microsoft's Internet Explorer as the top web browser in Europe.

||| Why have global spam levels declined?

PRINT

<<< New edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn censors 'n-word'. Replacing the offensive epithets will "counter pre-emptive censorship", says Twain scholar Dr Alan Gribben.

||| It's "unacceptable", says Peter Messent, author of the Cambridge Introduction to Mark Twain, despite "the feelings of anger and humiliation that many African American children and parents feel at having such a word repeatedly spoken in the classroom".

||| Delia Lloyd writes at Politics Daily: "The N-word isn't just a piece of regional jargon that marks a particular moment in our nation's history. It's a hateful word. It's poisonous. And it's pervasive... But this issue certainly isn't as black and white, so to speak, as some critics are making it out to be."

||| Review: The Empty Family: Stories, Colm Tóibín's new collection of short stories.

>>> Review: Annabel, by Kathleen Winter: "It is exceedingly rare for there to be intersex characters in literature..."

<<< Review: Hate: A Romance, by Tristan Garcia. "Central to the novel is the love-hate relationship between Dominique and William, who personify the loss of idealism in the French gay movement during [the early 80's]."

||| Review: Dancing Ledge, by Derek Jarman. "First published privately as Queerlife in the 1970s, Dancing Ledge is Jarman's own account of his life and art."

FILM

>>> Scenes from famous films recreated using Lego bricks by Alex Eylar (16 more pictures).

||| What's gay at Sundance 2011?

||| In London? Channel 4 will be In conversation with FIT actor Stephen Hoo on Tuesday 8th March 2011 from 14:30 to 17:30. You could be there.

<<< Review: The films of Derek Jarman. Cathode Ray Tube looks at Caravaggio (1986) and The Last of England (1987).

TV

||| Gay and lesbian characters are popping up on shows for young people. 90210, Glee, Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Hellcats, Greek and the new MTV series Skins all showcase young, gay characters...

||| ...But there's a downside, as MOC Blog points out: "The problem that I see is that we are forced - yet, again - to accept that the stories of gay white teenagers are the most palatable way for an audience to 'understand' homosexuality."

||| Russell T. Davies talks up Torchwood: Miracle Day, the new series of which will star Mekhi Phifer.

>>> EastEnders actor Arinze Kene seeks stage success. The actor and playwright proves he's more than just an amazing body with his play Suffocation.

<<< Former Hollyoaks actor Ricky Whittle covers Midlands Zone.

||| Is HBO's Boardwalk Empire the "new Sopranos"? In pictures.

||| How HBO became the world's most respected maker of TV drama.

||| Downton Abbey too taxing for American viewers...

||| ...But they understand The Wire. So why simplify Downton Abbey for them?

MUSIC

>>> Omarion is not bisexual. NOT! Got it?

||| Songstress Marsha Ambrosius tackles homophobia and GBLT youth suicide in her video for Far Away.

||| Singer Patrick Wolf to marry his boyfriend.

||| Country singer Chely Wright's sales halved after she came out.

<<< Ricky Martin unveils his new video - the first since he came out.

||| Ghanaian reggae artist Blakk Rasta says what's expected: "It is not the normal concept of life. Every man must sex a woman and not otherwise. Homosexuality is a mental/genetically disorder, in my opinion." Amnesty International condemns his remarks.

||| Rock is dead.

<<< HMV to close 60 stores as sales tumble. HMV is one of the last major "bricks and mortar" entertainment retailers on the British high street.

||| How music-buying habits have changed. Sarfraz Manzoor writes, "If and when record stores do disappear, our lives and our culture will be diminished because they are a tangible reminder of when music offered more than virtual pleasures."

||| How music-buying habits have changed.

>>> Tom Hanks' son is a rapper. Oh God.

||| Gerry Rafferty, the singer and songwriter, is dead. He was 63. Rafferty had a hit in 1978 with Baker Street, "a drive-time favourite that tackles drink, depression and sex."

SEX BIZ

<<< Erik Rhodes takes to Tumblr to denounce Diesel Washington as an "overgrown black man booty poppin' like a Jerry Springer reject." Oh-oh... Diesel's responds, "With the Merger of Falcon and Raging Stallions seems someone might be pushed out the door, and so why not jump on the Hate Diesel Washington train to get some press for himself."

||| Erik made the (gay porn blog) headlines with veiled suicide threats and rants about feeling overexposed, but: "i least lived life in the moment... what can you say you did? Oh...you went to school and got a degree and still only managed to land a job as an 'associate' at TJ Maxx. Well BRAVO! And i wasted my life."

>>> Meet Keni Styles: The biggest Asian porn star in the universe. Like, ever.

||| Incest, bareback, and watersports movies were top selling titles of 2010. Bel Ami's Peters' twins Taboo topped the list of 100 best sellers. The highest black entry was Black Balled 7.

<<< Made to pleasure: Bespoke sex toys for the gurl who has everything.

SPORT

>>> The most amazing thing about these new pictures of Plastic Boy Slut is that he isn't orange, and looks so much sexier for it...

<<< Colts' cornerback (whatever that is) Justin Tryon can barely keep it in his pants.

MANIKINS

>>> Monarchy in the UK, an editorial by Jamie Morgan for Arena Homme+.

<<< Kyle Ledeboer is naked - together with Chad White - in a series of Polaroid portraits by Andrea Vecchiato for WestEast Man.

>>> Hans is also naked, in The Emperor, by McKenzie James for Photographer&Muse.

<<< Boys boys boys! Coitus magazine launches its second print issue 'Bite Me' with five covers.

>>> Dolce & Gabbana release Uomini, featuring plenty of uomini.

<<< Twins, anyone? Thought so... Jonathan & Kevin Ferreina de Sampaio strip to their underwear in a campaign for Dsquared2...

>>> ...And there's more! Spanish twins Haydem & Raul Guerra star in Leave The Family, a story by photographer Gorka Postigo.

<<< Salieu Jalloh in Angels With Dirty Faces, in Fiasco magazine.

>>> AXN Magazine dedicates an editorial to the work of shutterbug Wander Aguiar.

||| Got your 2011 calendar yet? The Dieux Du Stade offering is a bit disappointing this year...

<<< Valley of the Dolls, a story by Steven Klein from 2005.

>>> Photographer Haris Farsarakis spends a day at the beach with the boys from V.N. Model Management, and manages to get some snaps in.

<<< Nil Hoppenot by Eric Sposito.

>>> Michael Capella, photographed by Fabien Montique.

||| In Love With Naleye, a breathtaking editorial featuring Dutch model Naleye Dolmans - 21 years-old! - in Fiasco magazine:

<<< Brazilian model Igor Augusto, shot by Chuando & Frey for Style: Men.

>>> Rodrigo Braga in Cosmopolitan magazine.

||| Rafael flaunts his wares for All American Guys, below left.

||| Who is this Paragonman, below right?

...AND FINALLY

||| Illegal rainbows.

||| One World Trade Center rises again.

||| Undercity, a film by Andrew Wonder, exploring subterranean NYC. Fascinating.

||| Darryl Stephens is raw, just for you! And you DON'T need a boyfriend!

||| And finally, our favourite Guy With iPhones from the last couple of weeks. Who's yours?

||| Read the last edition.

||| Remember what was going on this time last year?

No? How about a reminder? Read Issue 43.

||| Help me make next week's copy even better.

Contact me with tips and suggestions. If you're a model

or photographer, contact me about being on the cover.

Issue 83: 01-14 January 2011

Cover photo by Taylor Siluwé.

Please visit SGL Café for more!

ka-os|theory is not responsible

for the content of external websites.

© 2011

POSTSCRIPT

"You know, we might just as well not have bothered to come. The whole thing's been ridiculous."