#95

a news compendium

with a gay bias
issue 95 | May 2011 | FREE

<<< Photographer B. Charles Johnson's new series Substance. See the exhibition if you're in New York - it runs until 25th May. More manikins later...

...But first, this week's good, bad and indifferent bits.

||| Treasure Island Media's Paul Morris declares AIDS crisis over; calls condom use "capitulation". (The Sword)

||| Power Bottoming: The most disturbing new trend in homosexuality. (MOC Blog)

NORTH AMERICA & CANADA

>>> Tyler Clementi: privacy and persecution. "Dharun Ravi's indictment for hate crime is an important signal that bullying is a criminal offence, online or otherwise." (The Guardian)

||| High school bans jazz choir from singing Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody - because Freddie Mercury was gay.

||| Craig Cassey, an openly gay athlete from Pennsylvania, has been voted high school prom king.

||| Homophobia at Harvard.

||| Bill to combat GBLT youth homelessness goes forward.

<<< This is Mathias Oliver and his parents, and this is their story. Beautiful.

||| Oh dear. Are Eddie Long's sexual coercion lawsuits going to trial?

>>> The "black face" on gay marriage. Jonathan Capehart writes, "There is no question in my mind that there is a seamless arc connecting the civil rights fight waged by African Americans in the 1950s and 1960s and the one underway by gay men and lesbians. But not everyone agrees. Least of all other blacks and the black church in particular." (The Washington Post)

<<< New law bans Florida teenagers from wearing their jeans so low it reveals their underwear. (The Telegraph)

||| Change with a straight face barrels into the Castro. "There's an old saying in San Francisco: Market Street is straight, until it reaches the Castro. Cartographically true, it refers to the city's famously gay mecca. But these days, there are concerns that the neighborhood is becoming slightly less bent." (NYTimes.com)

>>> After 60 years, John and Richard's unfaded desire to "make it legal".

||| Gay, grey and groundbreaking: How Hollywood's young, gay and sexy cardboard cut-outs leave older gays in the shadows.

||| $US10 million of wasted glass at ground zero? "The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey [has] scrapped a plan to cover the concrete base of a World Trade Center tower with 2,000 clear prismatic glass panels due to technical problems." (msnbc.com)

||| Sometimes government plots are actually worth believing in. "If Osama bin Laden had been tried by a sober, international panel of jurists, we might have found out about US complicity in the making of him." (The Independent)

||| Donald Trump denies being a racist - because a black man won The Apprentice. That's alright then.

||| Trump's popularity has collapsed spectacularly.

||| The soft underbelly of the right's hard abs. "American conservatives – immune to camp – worship a cartoonish hyper-masculinity. It all seems a bit hysterical." (The Guardian)

||| CANADA: Homophobia rife in schools.

||| CANADA: Ottawa police target city's gay bars in street-level drug dealing investigation.

UNITED KINGDOM

<<< The Conservation government's negative impact on the GBLT community: "small, 'quiet' cuts and changes like scrapping recruitment diversity targets for fire services, making cuts to the Equality and Human Rights Commission and slimming down guidance on tackling homophobic and transphobic bullying in schools – all erode progress on GBLT equality." (So So Gay)

||| Homophobic attacks: Attacks on gay men expose a shocking rise in homophobia on the streets of London. (The Guardian)

||| LIVERPOOL: More homophobic assaults in city's gay quarter.

>>> LONDON: 18-year-old arrested over East End gay hate stickers.

||| LONDON: 12-year-old boy takes school to court over canerow hair ban. (Loving the informative caption under the picture on BBC News: "Cornrows are a frequent sight in London." Fucking morons.)

<<< Cab driver told to hide "phallic" crucifix.

||| WALES: A man has been jailed for a second time for conning gay male escorts.

||| The chaplain who helps gay farmers. "Being gay in an agricultural environment is not easy. One Christian ex-farmer concerned by suicides has set up a helpline." (The Guardian)

EUROPE

>>> Walk With Pride: Images Against Homophobia makes a pit-stop at the European Parliament. The exhibition features images of homophobia at Gay Prides from around the world. See it here.

||| EU court rules that a retired German man in a same-sex civil partnership should enjoy the same tax status as a married man when his pension is calculated. (BBC News)

||| EU parliament backs international anti-homophobia day.

||| SWEDEN: Being gay is a sin, Salvation Army tells uncover reporter.

||| POLAND: EU visa costs waived for June's gay pride march in Warsaw.

||| Europe to reverse decades of unfettered travel across the continent and reinstate passport controls amid fears of a flood of immigrants fleeing the upheaval in north Africa. (The Guardian)

LATIN AMERICA

<<< BRAZIL: Meet Lucas Malvacini, the new Mister Brazil.

||| Where next for Brazil's gay rights? "Same-sex unions have been legalised in Brazil, but work still needs to be done to improve tolerance of sexual diversity." (The Guardian)

AFRICA

<<< UGANDA: Parliament shelves "Kill Gays Bill" - for now.

||| More coverage on those events at The Guardian.

||| Rev. Canon Albert Ogle, President of the St. Paul's Foundation for International Reconciliation, has called upon fellow Anglicans "to clean up our toxic waste". He writes, "As a cradle Irish Anglican and for 30 years an Episcopalian priest, I was shocked to learn that out of 80 countries that currently criminalize homosexuality, 45 are former British colonies and whose modern elites are largely Anglicans i.e they run the country like Yowero Musevene of Uganda. The legacy of Anglican and British rule and morality in many parts of the modern world needs careful and urgent scrutiny right now in the light of two impending decisions that will undoubetedly save of destroy millions of human lives, in the name of an Anglican God."

>>> NIGERIA: This is 21-year-old Raphael Ikechukwu - according to the Nigerian Tribune, he's openly gay - who allegedly used a broken bottle to slash the throat of his Spanish boyfriend.

||| CAMEROON: Entrapment leads to long prison sentence for gay man.

||| Former star Cameroonian gay football player Gaston Dissake scores US asylum.

||| CONGO: A woman is raped nearly every minute of the day in the country, a study finds.

||| SOUTH AFRICA: Staggering 50% of black gay men in Soweto are living with HIV.

<<< SOUTH AFRICA: A controversial "baby safe" scheme, allowing parents to anonymously dump unwanted infants in a safe mounted on a public wall, has launched.

ASIA-PACIFIC

||| SINGAPORE: Delegates tell UN Human Rights Council, "What is being criminalised is not gay Singaporeans but homosexual acts". Consensual sex between men is illegal in Singapore.

>>> CAMBODIA: Phnom Penh hosts gay pride art exhibition. Pride runs until Tuesday 17th May.

||| Build it and they will come. Or perhaps not. More on Ordos, China's "empty city". (msnbc.com)

>>> CHINA: Window cleaners at work, Zifeng Tower, Jiangsu province, China, on Friday, 13th May:

||| AUSTRALIA: Malaysia to take 800 Australia asylum seekers; Australia shamefully washes its hands of vulnerable refugees, packing them off to a country with a grim human rights record.

MIDDLE EAST

||| Pinkwashing: Is Israel using its progressive stance on gay rights to cover up its policy on Palestine?

||| bin Laden's porn stash.

BODY & MIND

||| Seven hours sleep keeps the brain sharp.

||| Paracetamol link to blood cancer.

||| Higher reported instances of cancer in gay men, study finds.

>>> Interracial sex: Hot or not, website asks. Cue controversy and soul searching.

||| Anti-retroviral drugs reduce HIV transmission. (BBC News)

||| You don't need to sit down to read this. In fact, it's better if you don't.

<<< The mad guide to man boobs. (Via Deliciously Queer & Sinful)

||| BRAZIL: Underwear must now come with health warnings about the importance of screening for breast, prostate and cervical cancer, under a bill just finalised following 12 years of political debate. (The Telegraph)

THE NATURAL WORLD

||| UNITED KINGDOM: Department store Selfridges takes 70 types of threatened fish off their shelves.

<<< Animal pictures of the week (31 pictures). Left, a great white shark in South Africa, and right, a rare black Jaguar.

<<< The Big Picture: Dogs in the news (34 pictures). Left, "Dogs rescued by animal lovers are released from their truck at a shelter in Beijing April 16. Animal lovers mobilized by online calls for help blockaded a truck of hundreds of dogs being shipped off for food in a rare, permitted display of social action amid a broad crackdown on most kinds of activism." Right, "an abandoned dog pauses within the exclusion zone, about 6km away from the stricken Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant, in Futaba Town, Japan".

>>> THAILAND: The man with a suitcase full of leopards, panthers, monkeys and a bear. The living cargo, in pictures.

WEB & GADGETS

<<< Internet porn "normalises" extreme fantasies and increases the risk of sexual offences, psychologists warn.

||| Google Chromebook - the computer for people who hate computers.

||| Google is to make lightbulbs - and "almost anything electrical" - designed to "discover, connect and communicate" with other electrics. Christ.

||| Geek-war: Facebook exposed in Google smear campaign.

||| Is the internet going to be the death of television? (BBC News)

>>> Do you recognise this man? The hard knock life of an internet troll.

PRINT & VISUAL

||| Amazon.com renews $US25,000 grant to Lambda Literary's Writers' Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices. (Lambda Literary)

||| Thang, innit and MySpace added to Scrabble dictionary.

||| The death of print...

...Yet North Carolina GBLT newspaper QNotes is celebrating its 25th anniversary.

<<< CANADA: Saunders Architecture have completed the first of six artists' studios on Fogo Island, off the coast of Canada. (Dezeen)

CINEMA

||| Milk voted best gay film of the decade by online Stonewall poll.

>>> Going Down in La-La Land has opened at the Miami Gay & Lesbian Film Festival. The film is based on a book that looks at a struggling gay actor's few years in the gay porn piz.

||| Review: Seeing Heaven. "There's not a bad word to be said about Seeing Heaven if you discount the plot, dialogue, casting, direction, sound, lighting and its inability to stop you from slumping to the floor and lapsing into a boredom-induced coma." Ouch! (GaydarNation)

<<< Review: Alice. "If you're interested in a surrealism that explores the nature of a child's subconscious through a bricolage of imagery and symbolic meaning or a political allegory animated in a chateau in Prague that offers a Kafkaesque deconstruction of the city's Bohemian past then this striking and haunting film is highly recommended." (Cathode Ray Tube)

>>> The six stages of movie geek evolution.

||| An interview with Steve Hayes, the truly fantastic Tired Old Queen At The Movies.

<<< 16 movies in 16 quotes.

||| Praised, criticised, banned, and full of hardcore sex and violence, Bruce LaBruce’s L.A. Zombie is online for the first time, and it's playing exclusively on NakedSword. (The Sword)

TELEVISION

||| An interview with 90210's token gay, Trevor Donovan.

<<< EastEnders not realistic, its producer has confessed. EastEnders "very stylised" and offers an unrealistic portrayal of working-class life, but is "considerably more multicultural than it was even five years ago and is easily the most multicultural show on telly now".

>>> The Apprentice bragging game: candidates take business buzz-phrase nonsense, baffling bravado and self-aggrandisement to stratospheric new levels. (BBC News)

||| The Apprentice 2011: the best quotes so far.

||| Why The Twilight Zone puts today's TV sci-fi to shame. "With its time-bending twists and all-pervading paranoia, new box set reveals Rod Serling's classic is in a dimension of its own." (The Guardian)

<<< Review: Doctor Who - The Curse of the Black Spot. "As Doctor Who becomes a globalised commodity it begs questions about the function of genre, character and narrative and the dominance of the shopping list style commissioning where [showrunner] Moffat now instructs a writer with the simple by-line of 'Doctor Who and the Pirates'." (Cathode Ray Tube)

||| Current Doctor Who showrun(...into the ground)ner Steven Moffatt has launched a very public attack on the show's fans.

>>> If Ikea made manuals for time machines...

||| Why The Hand of Fear is a fitting tribute to Elisabeth Sladen. "Tonight BBC4 will begin repeating this 1976 Doctor Who story. It's the perfect way to honour to Elisabeth Sladen." (The Guardian)

||| 2|entertain have released a trailer for the forthcoming of the 1984 Doctor Who serial, Frontios.

||| Hubert Schlafly, who invented the teleprompter, is dead. He was 91.

MUSIC

||| George Michael: How I let down gay youth.

<<< Blue on drink, drugs, and bisexual affairs.

>>> Eurovision Song Contest 2011: the finalists, in pictures.

||| Is hip-hop homophobia at a tipping point? "Tyler, the Creator and Lil B are the latest rappers to turn the spotlight on homophobia in hip-hop, but the attention their lyrics attracts suggests attitudes are slowly changing." (The Guardian)

||| Dear Jason Derulo. We thought there was something special about you as soon as we saw the seriousface with which you sang the line "I'm putting on my shades to cover up my eyes." Here is a man, we thought, who cannot help but celebrate his own ridiculousness. (Popjustice)

THE SEX BIZ

<<< Last issue, we saw an excellent interview with the very sharp, very switched-on, and very hot HotRod. Angel Cruz follows that up with a look at HotRod and Angyl Valantino's scene, and accompanying interview, for BreedItRaw, and how they've "become the amazing, friendly sexually rebellious power couple they are now".

>>> BelAmi founder George Duroy launches new magazine style site, GDuroy.com, focusing on the youngest generation of BelAmi Models. Get a free copy here.

||| Chi Chi LaRue's Channel 1 Releasing has signed the identical Russo twins to an exclusive contract with the studio.

||| From twink to twunk: 7 twinks who made it big.

||| Twink of the year Seth Knight on being a twink, gangbangs and finding love.

<<< Corbin Fisher's Trey and Aiden play some ball, and get to know each other. In pictures.

>>> Drew Brody's also playing ball - albeit with himself - at SportsLads. In pictures.

<<< Like 'em big? Meet Maskurbate's Max.

||| The circumcision of Erik Rhodes: "Not the best experience of my life."

||| Aaron Rivers - one of the hottest porn stars out there right now - and Jimmy Coxxx tear it up at CockSureMen.com. In pictures.

>>> Brazilian Marc Bentley flaunts his impressive wares for Power Men.

<<< Bitchy queens have the knives out for ka-os|theory favourite Roman Heart, who's dared to get a bit older. He's one of the stars of The Other Side Of Aspen VI.

||| Falcon Studios offers free desktop calendars from The Other Side of Aspen VI...

...And here's the traditional Aspen orgy, from the long-running Falcon powerhouse brand, in pictures.

>>> Wally's World Blog has a flashback to former gay porn supercouple Daniel Marvin and Pedro Andreas, in Kristen Bjorn epic Skin Deep. It's your MasterChef fantasy come true!

||| GERMANY: Some snaps from Porn Star Orgy.

<<< Filmmaker David Barclay Moore's Race & Sex "profiles San Francisco based adult model and producer Race Cooper".

...Who also took some time to evaluate iPhone hookup apps. (Cybersocket)

MANIKINS

||| Michael Downs lenses Ryan Michelman:

||| Color Splash, a digitorial by Guy Hipwell:

||| Luis Carlos Aguayo lenses Tarek Amar:

||| From left to right: Armando Branco lenses Jorrit for Dorian magazine; Joe McCormick lenses Dan Brett; Tarrice Love lenses "Outstanding Bodies" - including Rob Evans - for German magazine Geil:

||| From left to right: Enokae has shot a story called Replicant, for Depesha; Mark Jenkins has lensed a stunning series of photographs, entitled Watermark; And meet Daniel, a "youth sports coach", who's (nearly) naked for DNA magazine:

||| Bruce Weber's stunning editorial for VMAN:

||| Abercrombie & Fitch opens first Paris store, floods city with shirtless manikins.

SPORT

<<< Carolina Panthers linebacker (huh?) Nic Harris puts his name - and face - to the No H8 campaign.

>>> Water baby Cullen Jones "gets a lil love from fellow Olympic gold medalist Ryan Lochte".

<<< Across the Atlantic, London lovely Louis Smith demonstrates his flexibility in British Airways, London 2012 campaign...

...And strips for an interview.

||| NEW YORK: Boxers - the gay sports bar - announces new Hell's Kitchen location.

...AND FINALLY

>>> It's the Cosmopolitan Annual Naked Centrefolds Special!

||| 10 dates when the world failed to end.

||| More on that tiny airport we heard about last week, and some sexy street dancing from Paris...

||| ...And our favourite GuysWithiPhones from the past few weeks, after the jump - enjoy!

Issue 95: 7-13 May 2011

||| Read the last edition.

||| Remember what was going on this time last year? No? How about a reminder? Read Issue 63.

Cover photo: Rob Evans, beautifully lensed by Christian Oita.

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© 2011