THE WEEK ACCORDING TO GARÇON STUPIDE

*Last weekend saw the 19th Annual House of Latex Ball. Video here. Pictures here.

*Why are so many of Our children living on the street?

*The Ali Forney Center, NYC's homeless shelter for LGBT youth, is naming one of their residences in honour of the late Bea Arthur. The actress was a donor and advocate of the centre up until her death.

*A Nationwide Kiss-In across America.

*Brad Pitt on gay marriage: "You really have to check what country you're living in because the freedom that allows you to practice religion is the same freedom you're stepping on. That's not right."

*"You wanna talk about Don't Ask Don't Tell, I'll tell you exactly what happened..." Bill Clinton gives his version of how Don't Ask, Don't Tell came about

.
*"The openly gay deputy would allegedly drive the streets looking for Hispanic men to pull over. He would ask for proof of residency, and if they didn't have it, ask for their "leche", slang for semen. He would pat them down and fondle them. He would make crude comments. He would demand their cell phone numbers and begin sending them text messages." Even the gay cops are, er... bent.

*The men celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary.

*Peter Tatchell, the Peter Pan of protests.

*The Equality and Human Rights Commission wants the next census to include a question on sexual orientation. The Office for National Statistics has previously said the question was "not suitable".

*Some People Are Gay, Get Over It - Stonewall's anti-homophobia campaign - is being relaunched to coincide with the start of the new school term. The slogan will be splashed across 500 display panels and in 20 major railway stations across England, Scotland and Wales for two weeks.

*Hooray! "The fag hag is becoming a relic of another era".

*Camp Fyrefly - a four-day "leadership camp" for gay and lesbian youth - has opened in Canada. Right, the Empress of Pomp, Pumps and Pom Poms, from the Imperial Court of the Sovereign Wild Rose drag queen group presiding over Queer Prom 2009.

*The gayest small town in Canada.

*New Zealand moves to abolish the heinous 'gay panic defence'.

*A 17-year-old boy in Senegal faces jail for alleged sexual acts "against nature". Earlier this month, two men from the same town were jailed under the same charges. What's happening in Senegal. Left, Senegalese gay anti-AIDS activist Serigne in 2005.

*The fatal consequences of being the invisible minority in Malawi.

*"Four men came into the shop. They pulled out guns. They were the Mahdi army. The place they took me to was very close to a mosque or actually in the courtyard – I could hear the call to prayer very clearly. When they hauled me out of the car, they beat me unconscious. Late the next day, they came to me and said, 'We know you are gay.' They pulled out a list of names and started reading them ... I knew four who were still alive. One they had already killed. They interrogated me for three hours that night. They demanded I give them names of other gays. At night they got a broomstick. They used it to rape me." The Iraqi gay witch-hunt continues to escalate.

*Human Rights Watch will urge in a report to be released Monday that the Iraqi government do more to protect gay men.

*The fallout from the shooting at the Tel Aviv gay centre earlier this month continues. An Iraqi writer has demanded the centre's managers "be forced to face a firing squad".

*And The Open House, Jerusalem's sole gay community centre, has employed an armed guard in response to the Tel Aviv attack.

*Arab Initiative - the first Arab LGBT rights group in Europe - launches in Sweden.

*...but the same country refuses asylum to gay Iraqis.

*India's first Gay pride parade in Mumbai (right); more pictures.

*Croatia's sex-education curriculum discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation, the European Committee of Social Rights finds.

*Did Flickr censor the Obama 'Joker' poster?

*The Obama administration admits that the Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA) is discriminatory - but will still defend it in court.

*The brutal truth about America's healthcare: in the country where everything has a price - even your health - 49 million people don't have access to health care.

*Nine out of 10 US dollar bills test positive for cocaine; the cleanest bills were found in Salt Lake City.

*New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority declares its bus and train schedules are copyrighted material and serves take down notice on the creator of a related iPhone application.

*Mosaic philosophy - and the 'Terrorist Facebook'.

*Controversy reignited at the Bay of Fires - the last refuge of Tasmanian Aborigines before their genocide.

*The Big Picture: Sri Lanka. 33 powerful images (above).

*"Some areas of India are going to run out of water."

*Mexico legalises, er... everything.

*Does my ass look big in this? It might, if you ride the São Paulo Metrô...

*Caster Semenya: 'Who are white people to question the makeup of an African girl? It is racism'.

*Caster Semenya: "She is not rejoicing. She [didn't] want the medal."

*Caster Semenya: Father defends his girl; video.

*Caster Semenya: 'The athletics authority has failed horribly in its duty of care.'

*Caster Semenya: 'Sport is one area of modern life where women's appearance isn't supposed to matter.'

*Caster Semenya: Treatment to be investigated by IAAF.

*Caster Semenya: When does a woman become a man?

*London boy Phillips Idowu gets his gold. "As he realised the magnitude of his achievement Phillips Idowu quietly knelt down on one knee and said a little prayer. Tears flowed and the 30 year-old, who had waited so long for a moment like this, was overwhelmed."

*Why did Tesco censor the word 'lesbian' on the cover of Lesbian Vampire Killers?

*Pimms ain't happy about Sainsbury's Pitcher's.

*The woman who endured 51 operations to transform herself into a living sculpture of the ancient Egyptian...

*Liberal Democrat MP Mark Oaten, infamous for his use of male prostitutes, claims he had 'a sexual relationship with an older man at the age of nine or ten'.

*Islam: how the West was lost.

*Why must we bow to the intolerant ways of Islam? *Lockerbie (left): 270 dead, no one behind bars.

*Lego enjoys a renaissance.

*London: The £1.5billion transformation of Elephant and Castle begins (right).

*...and is Victoria changing too?

*Another Soho fire.

*Good with a needle and thread? You could design a brand new seating fabric for the Tube. A billion passengers a year will sit on your design, which will be used in London Underground's train fleet of 4070 cars.

*Rupert Murdoch calls time on thelondonpaper after a £13m loss last year. Good riddance to bad rubbish. Litter-ly.

*London police stop five under-10s a day.

*Your mobile phone might be better at keeping track of your relationships than you are.

*Amazon's Kindle: defective by design, declare the Free Software Foundation.

*Equally defective is stylometry software.

*Wikipedia, now an online encyclopaedia, of three million articles.

*Driverless vehicles within 10 years.

*But are we ready for the Autonomous Age?

*Entertainment Weekly features first video display embedded in a magazine. Resources well used, then. Here's a video of this fantastically stupid, wasteful and pointless innovation:

*A boffin is working on an invisibility cloak.

*Don't be a mug, learn about Phase Change Material. Go on, you know you want to.

*Noah's ark will be relaunched.

*Vast oceans lay beneath surface of the Earth.

*Global warming will make the planet 'pitch over'.

*'It's everyone else's fault.' The psychological barriers preventing us from combating global warming.

*Photos of cake can keep you slim.

*'Brains count for a lot in mate choice', apparently. So why are so many stupid people breeding?

*"Women watch men strip for fun. Men watch women for darker reasons For women, it has nothing to do with sex. For men, it is about power."

*So, just how did some of us end up with white skin?

*Cannabis fights prostate cancer.

*Just how serious is your headache?

*Do you snore? You're twice as likely to die early.

*"Mathematicians from the University of Ottawa, using models designed to determine the effect of pandemic diseases, have calculated in their study 'When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection' that resistance would be futile, and that unless the rise of the undead was dealt with quickly, we would all be 'in a great deal of trouble'."

*'The AIDS deaths of the 1980s and 1990s have led to a kind of fetishising of barebacking' and 'There'll be a new wave of AIDS deaths'.

*China's giant pandas will be extinct with a few generations.

*And Kenya's lions will be gone within 10 years.

*26 incredible pictures of animals in the concrete jungle (above and below).

*Or how about 31 Animal pictures of the week?

*A camera, a man, and a 50ft humpback whale.

*Lower-ranking chimpanzees can bargain with their superiors to get more food.

*"Dog, horse, we eat it in Tonga. It's good food for us." Yes, it's the man who ate his own dog.

*The new species of worm that can deploy bombs.

*Cockroaches are future-proofed against climate change.

*"Psychotic, lying, whoring...skank." Those were the comments made by a blogger about model Liskula Cohen. A US court has ordered Google to hand over the identity of the blogger in order to sue her for defamation. Be careful what you say...

*What does new technology mean for the book trade, and in particular, for authors?

*E. Lynn Harris's famous 'Aunt G' is interviewed about her much-loved nephew.

*Actors and theatres should welcome signs of life from the audience, and that includes their mobile phones, apparently. Total rubbish.

*Chaos at the WeHo International Film Festival.

*BearCity - a gay romantic comedy set in NYC's 'bear community' - is holding a casting call for extras from tomorrow night (Monday 24th).

*James Cameron's Avatar can't be any worse than Titanic. Wanna bet?

*This sounds more like it: "Dorian Gray tells the story of a strikingly beautiful young man named Dorian (Ben Barnes). He arrives in Victorian London and is swept into a social whirlwind by the charismatic Henry Wotton (Colin Firth), who introduces Dorian to the hedonistic pleasures of the city. When a portrait of Dorian is unveiled, such is it's beauty that he makes a pledge: he would give anything to stay as he is in the picture – even his soul. Trailer.

*Vogue Evolution on MTV's America's Best Dance Crew:

*I don't get the whole vampire thing. Really, I don't. But I do enjoy The Lair for it's schlocky awfulness. A third season is due to premier on 4th September. A new comic strip fills in the gap between season 2 and 3. *True Blood paper dolls.

*"It's fantastic that it's happening, especially in the climate we live in. I have Muslim friends who are gay and some have come out, some haven't. This is a topic that needs to be looked at and EastEnders is fantastically brave to do it." Nina Wadia, EastEnders' Zainab Masood, talks about her onscreen son's struggle with his sexuality.

*Can you tell your re-ups, corner hoppers, and Spider bags apart? It seems like some people can't, and they're resorting to using subtitles to understand what's being said on The Wire. Writer George Pelecanos says, "It [subtitling] kind of reminds me of scenes from that [1980 disaster film spoof] comedy, Airplane!, when two black guys speak, and subtitles appear on the screen."

*An Israeli DJ is beaten up after playing Pet Shop Boys music, inciting women to dance and thus dishonour their husbands.

*How to save the music industry: 1960s-influenced, art-laden packaging.

*You are what you listen to: we make assumptions about someone's personality, values, social class and ethnicity based on their musical preferences.

*Which one of these tasty boy candys (above) should be Mr. Gay São Paulo? My vote goes to Hugo (top left). You can vote

here.

*The ten best men's fragrances.

*The greatest hoaxes that fooled the world (right).

*Virginia Davis, the first Disney actress, 31st December 1918 - 15th August 2009.

*Vernon Forrest, the boxer (far left), 21st January 1971 - 25th July 2009.

Issue 23 of The Week According To Garçon Stupide was built from articles collated during the week 16-22 August 2009.

On the cover: Federico Amoroso, by Sam Scott Schiavo, for FantasticsMag!

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