Your silence will not protect you

 M A N N E Q U I N 
 M A N I A 
men, in pictures

I don't care what you think unless it is about me

 R E A L 
 B O Y S 
narcissists & camera whores

I don't care what you think unless it is about me

 R E A L 
 B O Y S 
narcissists & camera whores

Ed Cervone

 A R T 
 S K O O L 
"Art is the lie that enables us to realise the truth..."

Issue 176: Jamaica, Lesotho, Larry Duplechan, AIDS, The Normal Heart, Mykki Blanco, Truvada, Tyson Beckford, Michael Jace, Godzilla, Finding Me, Sean Zevran, and more...




the week's
news
& pop
culture,
with a
gay
bias.


 Ponder This 



||| Why the rich and powerful can't stand public broadcasters.

||| 17th May was the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. In pictures:


< The Great Facebook Kiss-In, for all those Michael Sam haters.

 U.S. & Canada News 

||| Support for marriage equality among Americans has doubled in 18 years.

||| States are falling for marriage equality. Which will be the last one standing?

> Marriage equality comes to Oregon. In pictures.

||| Marriage equality comes to Pennsylvania.

||| Annual New York AIDS Walk raises millions. In pictures.

||| Talking to legendary AIDS activist Peter Staley about PrEP, Larry Kramer and more.

||| An AIDS memory. "I remember the pandemic as if it were yesterday because I lived and breathed it as both journalist and activist for a decade."

< The archival documents that illustrate the Feds' "obsessive effort" to purge gay employees.


||| More Americans would vote for a gay president than for an atheist one.

> President Obama nominates gay man Ted Osius (pictured here with husband Clayton Bond) as U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam.

< New ad warns Hollywood against patronising the anti-gay Sultan of Brunei's hotels.

> Fastfood chain Chipotle's gay pride ad angers conservatives.

||| Chicago's Gay Mart closes after 21 years; New York's gay gift shop, Rainbows and Triangles, closed last year.

||| Thank you for shopping at the 9/11 gift shop...


||| The Longform guide to bygone New York.

> Navy plebes mount greasy obelisk in annual Herndon Climb, video.

||| How the American dream is failing black college graduates.

||| After 11 years, states are finally committing to fight prison rape.

< Why charging teenagers as adults makes everyone less safe. Photogapher Ara Oshagan's "Juvies" exhibit documents "high-risk juvenile offenders being tried as adults in California", and includes images of teens in isolation, sometimes accompanied by their writings.

 U.K. News 

||| Domestic violence in the gay community is on the rise, Broken Rainbow report reveals.

> 19-year-old Floyd Evans sentenced to 14 years in prison for anti-gay stabbing.

||| Why party election broadcasts unite the nation in despair and embarrassment.

||| UKIP candidate Winston McKenzie, who said gay adoption is "child abuse", fails to be elected as councillor.

 Europe News 

< NETHERLANDS: Annual Milkshake festival will take place 20th July in Westerpark, Amsterdam.

||| MOLDOVA: Third annual gay equality march held in the capital Chisinau.


< RUSSIA: Hundreds of gay rights activists brave threats of violence to hold peaceful protest in St Petersburg.

||| UKRAINE: Gays targeted by both sides in conflict, UN warns.

> TURKEY: This is Levent Pişkin, a gay man who was convicted on Thursday for using the word "queer" in a Tweet.

 Latin America News 

< JAMAICA: Channel 4's Unreported World spends 12 days in Kingston filming the anti-gay abuse gay and trans youth endure from police and locals. The short film can be viewed at Channel 4 4oD (it is not blocked in other countries).


||| JAMAICA: Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller has betrayed gay voters by refusing to lift buggery law, says lawyer and activist Maurice Tomlinson

> PERU: We’re proud of our gay dad, say sons of Peru’s first out congressman, Carlos Bruce.

 Africa News 

||| African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights speaks out against the treatment of gays on the continent.

< NAMIBIA: We're Namibia's first gay married couple: Any questions for us?

||| UGANDA: Ethics Minister Simon Lokodo claims "whites brought this culture", are spreading homosexuality and pornography.

||| ZIMBABWE: Ruling party politician Richman Rangwani speaks out in support of gay equality, risking the wrath of rabidly anti-gay President Mugabe.

> LESOTHO: Activists march for gay equality for the second year running; same sex relations are illegal in the landlocked African country. In pictures.

||| SOUTH AFRICA: Zakhele Mbhele has become the first black openly gay MP to be sworn in in Africa.

||| SOUTH AFRICA: The ban on gay men donating blood has been lifted.

 Asia News 

< INDIA: Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival, Asia's biggest gay film festival turns to social media and crowd funding to raise finances.

> PAKISTAN: The transgender community hiding in a hostile city.

||| THAILAND: Gay students suffering verbal, physical and even sexual abuse at significantly higher rates than their straight counterparts.

< TAIWAN: Activists stage controversial gravestone rally.

||| TAIWAN: Gay student jumps to his death in protest against discrimination.

||| AUSTRALIA: New South Wales repeals murder "gay panic" defence law.

 Middle East News 

> IRAN: Homophobia is un-Islamic, has no place in society, Dr. Mostafa Eghlima, leader of the Iranian Social Workers Association, declares.

||| KAZAKHSTAN: Anti-gay activists build wall around gay nightclub.

 Art & Design 

< Don't miss “Just Me And Allah”, Samra Habib's photography that documents queer Muslims.

> The photography of John Simone, who lensed the New York "Club Kid" scene of the '80s.

||| Photographing the beauty and inhumanity of Asia's cramped megacities...


< Inside heiress Huguette Clark's California mansion, frozen in time for 60 years.

 Word! 

||| Why many young Chinese women are writing gay male erotica.

||| John R. Gordon's writer's diary: Writing action in prose and screenplays. "As a novelist I get a real kick out of writing action sequences. Like dialogue they whisk the reader along, and, done well, achieve that gasp-out-loud page-turning effect that’s always so great when you’re reading a book..."

A conversation with Larry Duplechan, author of the iconic Blackbird.

 Shouting In The Night 

< Kinky Boots cast members Eugene Barry-Hill and Timothy Ware get married during a hiatus from the hit Broadway musical.

> Bathhouse the Musical to open at the Above the Stag Theatre in London's Vauxhall, from 18th June to 20th July.

 At The Movies 

||| The battle for the soul of AIDS. "Admittedly, the church failed many gay men with AIDS in the early days, but a riveting new documentary looks at how one Latino man got caught in the crossfire between love, illness, and Catholicism."

||| Ryan Murphy talks about shooting The Normal Heart's intense sex scenes between Mark Ruffalo and Matt Bomer.

||| Barbra Streisand finds gay sex "distasteful", Larry Kramer claims.

> Film review: The Normal Heart. "A flawed film, but an important one."

||| HBO's film adaptation of Larry Kramer's iconic play The Normal Heart premieres this weekend; here's three new clips, and a featurette.


< Tyson Beckford, Michael Jai White to star in black male stripper film Chocolate City.

||| How YouTube and internet journalism destroyed Tom Cruise, our last real movie star.

> London supermarket markets 12 Years A Slave DVD with a "get the look" mannequin.

< The best of the homoerotic "Cherik" X-Men fan art.

||| Cinema review: Saint Laurent. "A smirking deification. This second biopic of the fashion designer in as many years is cut from the same cloth as the first: swooning, self-absorbed and strangely lacking in any wider interest in society."

||| Cinema review: Godzilla. "What's fresh and redemptive, though, about this particular Godzilla is the artistry and confidence of the young director Gareth Edwards and his team."

> The many, many questions Godzilla leaves unanswered.

||| Why Godzilla kicked Pacific Rim's ass at the box office.

||| When they ask Americans if they think on Hollywood should glamorise the terrible and true story of the giant lizard attack on Tokyo that killed more than 100,000 people back in 1954...


||| The plot to Jurassic World sounds impressively ridiculous.

< Replica Ghostbusters car goes on sale.

> True Blood's Joe Manganiello has directed a new documentary called La Bare, which follows the performers and fans of the La Bare strip club in Dallas.

||| Trailer: Pride, starring Bill Nighy, Dominic West and Imelda Staunton, a new film about the role gay people played during the 1980s miners’ strikes.


 Telly Addicts 

||| Logo distances itself from RuPaul for defending use of anti-transgender "slur".

||| Webseries EastSiders gets funding for second season.

< Finding Me the Series powers ahead with work on its second season. Watch the new episodes here.


||| Mad Men takes a look at gay life in the '60s.

> Michael Jace (who played a closeted cop on The Shield) has been arrested for the shooting death of his wife, April Jace.

Talking to Sally Jessy Raphael, accidental gay icon.

||| Judge Judy moves to prime time.


||| Gays of our lives: The latest from our favourite gays in soaps, with Anthony D. Langford.

||| Coronation Street releases 2014 cast photo.


 Beats, Rhymes & Life 

< Mykki Blanco arrested in Portugal "for being gay".

||| Check out new music from kaos favourite Ken Dahl.

||| 12 alt-R&B artists you need to know about.

||| Retired police officer reveals Tupac Shakur's last words.

||| Video: UK singer Sam Smith "comes out" (right) in Leave Your Lover; Ukrainian synth pop group (famous for their stilletoes) Kazaky - Magic Pie; Adore Delano - DTF; and Courtney Act - Mean Gays.


 Sex 

Inside London's dying sex cinemas.

What AB1576 means for the porn industry.

>  Josiah Jennings (a.k.a. porn star Sean Zevran) on racism.

||| Watch the first episode of The Palm Springs Boys, a new webseries about the annual Blatino Oasis.


 The Human Body 

||| How I broke my dick: A cautionary tale of average length.

||| One unexpected benefit of a decade of marriage equality? Improved health.

< Why did AIDS ravage the U.S. more than any other developed country?


||| Could coral provide the next HIV prevention tool?


> Why HIV can still land you in jail. Zimbabwean-born Godfrey Zaburoni, right, was jailed for a decade by an Australian court for knowingly infecting his girlfriend.


||| Could prostate cancer be a sexually transmitted disease?


 Betta Work! 

||| Where's the worst place to be a worker? Most of the world. "A new index of employment rights makes grim reading and exposes the link between rights and inequality."

||| The jobs we could be doing by the 2030s.

 Planet Earth 

< It's a point of no return in West Antarctica. What happens next?

||| The people of Miami know about climate change. We're living it.


||| How record rains turned Australia into a giant green global carbon sink.

||| Are pesticides killing all the honeybees? Not so fast.


Dogs of war. "Out in front of America’s troops, combat canines and their handlers lead the way onto the most dangerous battlefields on Earth."

THE BIG PICTURE: A brown bear and her cubs at Hagenbeck zoo in Hamburg, Germany.

 Inside The Spaceship 


||| The Internet giants wooed us, but the honeymoon is over.

||| How the internet has ruined our conception of time.

||| Facebook didn't invent the verb "Unfriend", but it has changed the meaning.

||| Why only the powerful will benefit from the "right to be forgotten".


 Arena 

< How Derrick Gordon's coming out led to an activists war.

> Cristiano Ronaldo is naked on the front of Vogue. Sadly, he isn't alone.

||| There's a lot that's gay about soccer - but don't tell the fans.

 And Whilst You're 
 Thinking About 
 That, Think 
 About This 



||| 10 slang phrases that perfectly sum up their era.

||| And finally, Rogue "Marbie" Scott does arseArsenal; Andrew talks about being a "cool" gay; Walter gets into it with porn star XL; and Davey Wavey makes some shirtless straight dudes hug.

 
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