Guess who?

a news compendium

with a gay bias
issue 88 | February 2011 | FREE

<<< Brandon Bell, lensed by Calvin Brockington. More manikins later.

But first, the global GBLT news...

>>> Exploring the special relationship between Cyon Flare and photographer Brandon Stanton.

NORTH AMERICA & CANADA

>>> Hanging on by a Sequin: The fight for La Cueva, the country's oldest Latino drag bar.

||| Retailer Target stops giving to anti-gay equality groups.

||| Westboro Baptist Church gets takedown threat from hackers; responds.

||| Navy veteran Joseph Rocha refutes misleading Associated Press story: I did not ask for anti-gay hazing.

||| Military trains for Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal.

<<< We Are the Youth: "A photographic journalism project chronicling the individual stories of LGBT youth in the United States."

||| 100 Gay Men: Calling gay adults to action. "If tribal elders are lost, adults will be lost; and if tribal adults are lost, youth will be lost."

||| Palm Springs plans $US250m old folks' community - for gays.

||| Michael Lucas: Gays need a drug intervention. "These people are self-medicating away the pain from childhood scars left by bullying, abuse, and homophobia... But enough is enough."

>>> No more Gay Boy sandwiches.

UNITED KINGDOM

<<< LONDON: Parts of the East end are declared a "gay-free zone" by an anonymous Islamic group. Ali Hilli of Iraqi LGBT says, "This small group of narrow minded people do not represent Islam or the Muslim community. In fact, a sentiment of rejection and condemnation for such a small group is growing among all Muslims. It is our duty to stop them and stand up to them whether we are Muslims, Jews or Christians."

>>> Some believe the answer to the problem is love.

||| Meanwhile, British gay Muslims seek Islamic weddings.

||| LONDON: They asked me if I was gay. Then they stabbed me. Four sought in homophobic attack.

||| From The Sun (apologies in advance): Wife blast soldier was gay flings sex addict.

||| NORTHERN IRELAND: Fundamentalist clerics furious as gay sauna, The Cage, opens in Derry.

>>> Gay hotels investigated for breaching equality laws.

||| Is full gay marriage on the way?

||| Not, Johann Hari believes... Get bishops out of our law-making. "Is Nick Clegg even going to abandon his atheism, and give the forces of organised religion yet more power over us?"

||| Anti-gay bigot to lead Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservative allies in Europe.

||| Manchester, Britain's gay capital - in Victorian times.

CARIBBEAN SOUTH AMERICA

||| BRAZIL: Prominent American gay rights academic Mark Blasius in brutal homophobic attack in São Paulo.

||| Latin America's first gay cruise set for December...

<<< ...A far cry from this drug smuggling submersible, discovered by the Colombian Army, on Valentine's Day.

AFRICA

||| WikiLeaks cables reveal David Kato was mocked by a member of the Ugandan Human Rights Commission at UN-backed human rights meeting

||| In death, as in life, David Kato has the power to help gay Ugandan people. "The murder of the gay rights activist may at least save BN, a lesbian asylum seeker like me, from deportation."

<<< The Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe is to decriminalise gay sex.

||| Does the new "free" Egypt mean freedom for gays and lesbians there?

ASIA PACIFIC

<<< CHINA: Gay couples gatecrash Beijing kissing competition.

>>> INDIA: Juan Carlos and Mauro - a gay Spanish couple - display the babies they've acquired from a rent-a-womb service in India. All those kids in children's homes can just go to hell, I guess...

<<< INDIA: In Nepal, devotees light oil lamps carried by a youth portraying God Madhavnarayan during the Madhav Narayan Mela.

BODY & MIND

>>> Black gay men and sexual labels. "Sexual labeling is commonplace, amongst all gay men, but black gay men seem to take it to another level. These days we have tops, total tops, oral tops, vers tops, versatile, vers bottom, bottom, total bottom and all kinds of deranged derivatives thereof. I say deranged, because most of the time black gay and bisexual men refer to themselves, using their label du jour, they are lying."

Interracial love in Rikki Beadle-Blair's FIT.

<<< Black gay men dating exclusively outside their race: Do we have a problem here? "What I'm talking about here are black gay men, who ONLY date non-black men and more specifically white men. The kind of black gay men, who never seem to have any black friends and when they do, their friends have to be part of the 'I don't date black men' click."

||| The pain of being gay on Valentine's Day.

>>> PHEW! I'm not the only one, then: Sidewalk rage is real and it's spectacular...

...More importantly, what about velvet rage? "Gay men are four times more likely to suffer from depression than straight men. The reason? According to therapist Alan Downs, it's a toxic cocktail of anger and rejection, which he calls 'velvet rage'. Here, he discusses his controversial self-help manual – plus, starting right, we hear five very personal 'coming out' stories."

||| Got a cold? Get zinc.

<<< HIV as you've never seen it before. More on that in detail.

||| Ecstacy doesn't damage the brain after all, boffins claim.

PRINT & VISUAL

>>> Perry Moore, whose novel Hero - about a gay superhero - won a Lambda Literary award for best novel - is dead. He was 39. Moore, pictured left with his partner Hunter Hill, also produced the three recent Narnia films.

||| American bookseller Borders to close 200 stores.

<<< Back to the future: The captivating photographic project that recreates old photos - today. Left, Ian in 1984, and again in 2010.

MUSIC

||| Are the gays really turning on Lady Gaga?

||| This lot ain't, at least:

||| Gay hate purveyor Buju Banton bags himself a Grammy. Wonder if the Grammys would be so quick to reward someone preaching racism?

||| Banton blames his financial woes on gay activists.

<<< Chris Brown's 10 Funniest Fashion Fails.

>>> The media reports that Justin Bieber is a raving homophobe because he thinks homosexuality is a choice. Hardly anyone reports the entire quote: "It's everyone's own decision to do that. It doesn't affect me and shouldn't affect anyone else."

||| How about Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber?

||| Suffer Bieber-rage? This will cheer you up:

TELEVISION

<<< Former NBA star Rashad McCants to star as "the bisexual, hardcore leader of a ring of professional "boosters" aka high-end shoplifters" in new web series The Booster Club.

>>> Introducing Tha Life: Atlanta. Please God, no...

||| Coronation Street to screen its first gay wedding the same day as the royal wedding.

<<< Twin Peaks 20th anniversary art exhibition. I've never seen the show, but this is impressive stuff.

||| Jesse Metcalfe cast as Christopher Ewing in new season of Dallas. Fellow ex-Desperate Housewives boy candy Josh Henderson has already been announced as John Ross Ewing.

||| BBC iPlayer to feature shows from other terrestrial broadcasters.

CINEMA

||| Review: Role/Play.

||| Did the New York Times just discover Hollywood's race problem?

>>> Anatomic poster for Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin That I Inhabit revealed.

<<< Kellan Lutz is Poseidon.

||| Ghanaian actor John Dumelo shrugs off gay rumours.

SEX BIZ

<<< Brent Everett takes a ride on the twincest train.

||| François Sagat on his "sabbatical" from porn.

||| Mason Wyler on his post-HIV return to porn.

>>> Corbin Fisher's porn piracy crackdown could out gay teens. "With lawyers preparing to go fishing for the names belonging to tens of thousands of IP addresses, are these gay smut companies also about to out gay teens? And adults?"

||| Direct-to-DVD: Prime for a comeback? "For years, films that first debuted on DVD were the standard, but not anymore. The shift to web compilations has been as dramatic as the Instant Death of VHS and the Great Porn Magazine Die-Off."

<<< How to protect his knees when you're getting head.

MANIKINS

>>> Stunning shots of Harol B, by Devious Honey.

<<< Allan Spiers has created a spectacular set of pictures featuring "Josh B." (and his equally spectacular thighs).

>>> David Agbodji lenses himself for WAD magazine.

<<< Roman Blinov, by Arno Roca, for XNOTDEAD magazine.

||| King Underwear Paris photoshoot. Spot the underwear...

...Meanwhile, teamm8 from Australia features 23-year-old rugby player Nick Taylor:

||| Abdelilah Lahboub, shot by A&C:

||| Tom Wenpensri is lensed by photographer Jason Hoeung for 2EROS underwear:

||| Marco Da Silva by Paulo Cabral for Junior magazine:

<<< Lukas Ridgestone and Kris for DNA magazine.

>>> Very cool pictures by Robert G. Bartholot, featuring Šimon Kotyk.

SPORT

||| Athletic boy babe Harry Aikines-Aryeetey injured at Birmingham Grand Prix; Mark Lewis-Francis also injured. More Harry here.

THE NATURAL WORLD

>>> The Big Picture: 135th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show (33 more pictures).

||| Monkey business.

||| Animal pictures of the week (29 more pictures).

WEB & GADGETS

||| Facebook adds "Civil Union", "Domestic Partnership" to relationship status options.

||| The battle brewing over the .gay domain.

||| Saint Isidore - Patron Saint of the Internet.

...AND FINALLY

||| Calvin Klein's toy boy Nick Gruber vs. Playgirl editor Daniel Nardicio.

||| Asian baby drag princess does Burlesque.

||| Sperm shoes!

<<< Time is running out...

||| Our favourite GuysWithiPhones from the past week, after the jump - enjoy!

Issue 88: 14-20 February 2011

||| Read the last edition.

||| Remember what was going on this time last year? No? How about a reminder? Read Issue 51.

||| 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.

Cover photo: 3D model of the HIV virus.

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."