#97

a news compendium

with a gay bias
issue 97 | May 2011 | FREE

<<< Samuel photographed by Karim Konrad. More mannequins later...

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

>>> Don Lemon's boo: Interracial love is A Okay! Toddy English writes about the black gay community's intolerance for interracial love...

...And on the other side of the coin, an ugly incident with a racist gay support group.

||| US adults believe 1 in 4 Americans are gay. If only.

NORTH AMERICA & CANADA

<<< Eddie Long settles sexual coercion lawsuits with four young men.

||| Drama Dupree has something to say about the matter!

>>> Marlo Thomas says Free To Be is dead and buried: "Just how many dead teenagers, driven to end their own lives, is it going to take for adults to stand up and say,What the hell is going on? There was a time when the words "Free to Be" embodied a hope that whatever a kid was, was good enough. But 'freedom' doesn't describe the world of this generation. Or of their parents."

<<< Tyler Clementi: Dharun Ravi enters not guilty plea as trial gets under way. He faces 15 charges including bias intimidation, invasion of privacy and evidence tampering.

>>> On Coming Out: Exploring the stories of gay teenagers; an audio slide show. Right, 19-year-old John Alburquerque, who came out in high school.

||| Gay couples make most of nurturing adopted kids. "Although state's same-sex partners can't marry, youths feel blessed to have them as foster parents." (The Indianapolis Star)

||| Why we should boycott heterosexual marriages.

<<< Georgia State Rep. Rashad Taylor comes out: "I am a gay man".

||| US House approves Defense Bill with anti-gay provisions. "Anti-gay language... could disrupt Don't Ask, Don't Tell repeal and would reaffirm the Defense of Marriage Act." (Washington Blade)

||| Don't Ask, Don't Tell: A gay officer offers an inside view of the military's rush to adapt. (TIME)

||| Marines discuss Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

||| Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Military chaplains fear repeal of ban on openly gay soldiers will alter conversations with troops. (The Washington Post)

||| The global impact of one young, gay soldier's stress.

>>> Bradley Manning's Facebook documents his disillusionment and gay pride. View it all here.

||| Meet Sharon Slater, the right-wing leader of Family Watch International, who has been "lobbying United Nations delegates to oppose GBLT rights". She's been warning them that developed countries like the US are trying to push the "sexual agenda" in developing countries. The clue here is the phrase "developed countries", Shaz!

||| New York: Mayor Bloomberg states case, emphatically and personally, for same-sex marriage. (New York Times)

<<< New York: Michael Lucas calls for boycott of the LGBT Center. The porn mogul "is angry the Center has apparently offered use of its space to the Queers Against Israeli Apartheid".

||| New York: Public hospital employees to get training in dealing with GBLT patients.

>>> Fire Island: Meat Rack 101. "Everything you need to know about Fire Island’s most fabled spot: What it is, how it got there and how to get out alive!" (Next Magazine)

||| Portland: Gay couple brutally attacked for holding hands.

||| After the tornado, Joplin's GBLT community comes together.

<<< Stunning before and after pictures of a Joplin, Missouri neighborhood. Sobering.

||| Don Lemon: How I learned to stop "praying away the gay".

||| The gay stigma for black males. "CNN weekend anchor Don Lemon is gay. He's also black. If you don't think being a black man who is gay is a big deal, think again." (JSOnline)

||| From the Take With A Grain of Salt Department: Racism worse for white Americans than black Americans. "White people in the United States now feel more discriminated against than black people, according to a new study by professors at Harvard Business School and Tufts university." (The Telegraph)

||| Back in the real world, African American and gay inmates are being targeted by white supremacists at a privately run prison in Idaho - while guards look the other way.

||| ABC's What Would You Do? tackles homophobia towards gay families.

UNITED KINGDOM

||| "We won't go away" - an interview with human rights activist Peter Tatchell.

>>> How the Church of England has tied itself in knots over allowing gay men to become bishops.

||| Equality, prejudice, power and the Church of England. "Recent news items have raised serious doubts about the Church of England’s commitment to equality and justice." (Ekklesia)

||| Conversion therapy: she tried to make me "pray away the gay". "Two years ago, Patrick Strudwick began challenging therapists who claimed they could change a patient's sexuality. This week he won his battle against one." (The Guardian)

<<< The increasing Islamisation of London's East End: The villains who thrive behind a veil of multiculturalism. "When a Christian society stops believing in God, it's not the case that it will start to believe in just anything. If you want to see what does fill the vacuum, get on the bus to the dear old East End." (The Telegraph)

>>> WALES: The country's oldest gay bar to be converted to a "bistro restaurant with a 'broad appeal' to 'all sectors of the local community'." And we all know what that means.

||| SCOTLAND: The Church of Scotland - the country's largest protestant church - votes to allow gay ministers, lifting a temporary ban imposed in 2009.

EUROPE

<<< RUSSIA: "We will defy the illegal ban," Moscow Pride activist Nikolai Alexeyev vow.

||| RUSSIA: Lt. Dan Choi, who fought Don't Ask, Don't Tell, takes on Moscow's gay pride ban...

...Ian McKellen's got something to say too: "The mayor of Moscow is a coward... he panders to the right wing. He throws them some red meat, some gays, to gnaw on."

||| IRELAND: Off duty policeman savagely beats man for wearing "gay shirt"; goes to jail.

>>> POLAND: Police arrest 14 opponents of gay march.

||| Air France flight AF447: The final moments.

||| Air France flight AF447: Pilots' battle for survival. "Initial findings from black box recorder reveal flight 447 fell 10,000ft per minute after Airbus jet hit heavy Atlantic storm." (The Guardian)

LATIN AMERICA

||| BRAZIL: School sex education material - including videos designed to combat homophobia - suspended by President, following pressure from evangelical church groups.

<<< MEXICO: Youth follows drug barons' fashion with Ralph Lauren polo shirts. "Branded shirts worn by arrested barons have become a trend among youth who 'want to look like the bad guys'."

||| JAMAICA: Church joins State in opposing challenge to constitution by gay activists. (JamaicaObserver)

>>> BERMUDA: Home is where the hatred is.

||| GRENADA: Police arrest man for gay sex.

AFRICA

||| Former leaders of Botswana and Zambia: Decriminalise same-sex relations across Africa.

||| UGANDA: In Kampala, words of hope from a gay bar.

<<< UGANDA: Uganda and the Anti-Homosexuality Bill have become synonymous on the international stage. On either end of the debate are its author, MP David Bahati, and one of its most vocal opponents, gay rights activist Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera. (Daily Monitor)

ASIA-PACIFIC

>>> 29 ways towards an LGBTIQ-friendly Malaysia! Part of International Day against Homophobia & Transphobia.

||| THAILAND: As Bangkok's gay population gains in confidence, more and more businesses are waking up to the pink Baht.

<<< BURMA: Gay rights activists denounce discrimination. Photo: Burma Lay.

||| INDONESIA: In Jakarta, GBLT groups march to commemorate International Day against Homophobia & Transphobia.

||| VIETNAM: Researchers call for greater public awareness about the consequences of homophobic discrimination. (Thanh Nien Daily)

>>> VIETNAM: Hieuvecon.vn - a website for parents and friends of the GBLT community - has been launched in Ho Chi Minh City.

||| CHINA: Cures That Kill, a film that tells the story of two gay men struggling in a society that mostly rejects them. (Los Angeles Times)

||| Chinese labour camp prisoners forced to play online games: "After a long day of hard labour, scores of Chinese prisoners are now being forced to spend their nights playing online games in order to win credit for their guards." (The Telegraph)

<<< AUSTRALIA: UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, criticises racist and inhuman refugee plan.

||| Comparing Australia to Australia to apartheid-era South Africa, Pillay said: "I come from South Africa and lived under this, and am every way attuned to seeing racial discrimination. There is a racial discriminatory element here which I see as rather inhumane treatment of people, judged by their differences, racial, colour or religions."

SOUTHERN ASIA

<<< INDIA: Gay came to Bollywood last week, with the 125 film Mumbai International Queer Film Festival 2011. It's a much more impressive line-up than London's lesbian-mafia dominated schedule; Rikki Beadle-Blair's FIT and KickOff both screened, as well as Kirk Shannon-Butts' Blueprint, and Brazilian film From Beginning to End (Do Começo Ao Fim). There were films from 22 countries in all.

||| Prince Manvendra Singh Gohil no poster boy for gay India.

||| A look at gay relationship issues from an Indian perspective.

MIDDLE EAST

||| GBLT community in Egypt, Tunisia worry about post-revolt era.

||| Afghanistan's accidental gay pride. "The embarrassment over the trend for rainbow flags on cars in Kabul reminds us how far Afghanistan is from the liberal west." (The Guardian)

BODY & MIND

<<< Toddy English investigates the perils of online gay dating. "There is an adage that says, "Hurt people hurt people." It makes a great deal of sense and never have I found it more apropos than within the confines of online gay dating websites like: Adam4Adam, BGCLive, Yahoo! Personals, and various others."

||| Grindr: Welcome to the world's biggest, scariest gay bar. (Vanity Fair)

||| To drink, or not: Regular tipple better than no drink at all.

||| Red meat raises bowel cancer risk. "Cutting down on red and processed meat, eating more fibre and exercising regularly could cut bowel cancers by 43 per cent." (The Telegraph)

||| How to deal with stress. "Don't just accept stress as an inevitable part of modern life, urges Gill Edwards, a pioneer in 'conscious medicine'." (The Telegraph)

||| The "science" behind the "Gayccent": The highly dubious research that suggests gays speak differently to straights. Garbage.

||| Johnson & Johnson wins FDA approval for its Edurant pill, the first new AIDS treatment in three years. (Bloomberg)

||| Author Edmund White talks about 30 years of AIDS. "People didn't want to kiss you on the cheek."

>>> San Francisco's Twin Peaks red ribbon marks 30th AIDS anniversary.

THE NATURAL WORLD

||| The Big Picture: Severe weather continues in central US (36 pictures), and (24 more pictures). Above, a destroyed Home Depot, and a damaged hospital, below.

<<< Animal pictures of the week (30 pictures). Left, an 18-day-old pygmy hippopotamus at Bratislava zoo. Right, Rhesus monkeys in New Delhi, India.

||| Nazis tried to train dogs to talk, read and spell to win World War II.

||| Meet Mason, "the Benji dog who was snatched by a tornado in Alabama and blown far away from home. When Mason dropped to the ground, two of his legs broke like your heart while reading this sad shit. Mason didn't give up, though! As the theme song from Rocky played and determination took over his body, Mason used his two front legs to crawl all the way home." (Dlisted)

WEB & GADGETS

||| Google abandons newspaper scanning project, which would have seen millions of pages of archive newspapers digitised and indexed.

||| For really dumb people (and people who slavishly follow Apple): Tesco launches shopping trolley sat nav.

||| Traditional camera film makes a come back.

DESIGN

<<< NETHERLANDS: Rijkswaterstaat Assen, an office building by 24H architecture, in Assen.

||| Loved and loathed – the armoured knights of the National Grid. "New generation of pylons carrying UK power supply will have to be very good to match up to designs of the 1930s." (The Guardian)

>>> S. MICHAEL ISLAND: Portuguese architect Bernardo Rodrigues has designed this stunning house in the Azores.

||| Office chairs! "Jonathan Olivares' study of the evolution of the office chair", in pictures...

...And Dutch designer Maarten Baas designed this chair "with a ladder-back reaching into the sky for human rights charity Amnesty International". (Dezeen)

PRINT & VISUAL

>>> Our friend, blogger and author Taylor Siluwé, has been undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer. Like the trooper he is, he's been writing about it at SGL Café. Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

||| Barnes & Noble: $US1bn takeover bid by Liberty Media for struggling bookseller.

||| Barnes & Noble: a history.

||| Why Waterstone's is vital to the book trade. "More and more book sales may take place online, but there's still a crucial role for the high-street chain." (The Guardian)

<<< Cobra Killer - about the murder of Cobra Video producer Bryan Kocis - is set for publication by Magnus Books (founded by Don Weise, formerly of Alyson Books).

||| Review: The Psychopath Test, by Jon Ronson.

||| Read an utterly engrossing extract, and discover how to spot a psychopath.

||| The 23rd Annual Lambda Literary Award winners.

>>> Huge testicular tumour helps identify subject of 19th century portrait. "A proud French surgeon was drawn with the trophy of his work – excised from Napoleon's foreign minister." (The Guardian)

<<< "Untitled (Crash 1)", a sculpture at the Saatchi Gallery in London.

>>> Leonora Carrington, the surrealist artist, is dead. She was 94.

STAGE

<<< Review: WTC View. "A World Trade Center view no longer exists by the beginning of WTC View, Brian Sloan's uneven account of tentative love and palpable loss in the weeks after 9/11." (New York Times)

||| Review: WTC View. "This isn't really a play for those of us who were here on 9/11 and in the weeks and months that followed; we have the original. For the rest of America, there are answers here, written down when they could still be remembered, to questions nobody thinks to ask anymore." (Capital New York)

||| Review: WTC View. "It is a testament to playwright Brian Sloan that his play — his first effort — still captures the elegiac but persevering mood that continues to shape the city."

CINEMA

||| Movie poster photoshop disasters.

>>> Review: Homme au Bain (Man at Bath), starring French porn star Francois Sagat.

||| Review: Taxi Zum Klo. "Frank Ripploh's semi-autobiographical tale of a respectable teacher who indulges in unapologetic promiscuity in his spare time is not for the fainthearted."

<<< Maurice Murrell, the actor and model, is dead. He was 32. Murrell is best known for his role in the film Finding Me, and its sequel, Finding Me: Truth. Details of his funeral service here.

||| There's a moving interview with Maurice's mother here. "I knew before he was four years old what his sexuality was. We love him. And if you love your child, you have to love them the way they are."

||| Bill Hunter, the actor, is dead. He was 71. Hunter is best known for The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert (1994). He also appeared in Doctor Who in 1966.

TELEVISION

>>> Geordie Shore explodes onto British screens, much like an orange person vomiting on Any British High Street on a Saturday night.

||| The BBC publishes plans for improving gay representation in its programme making, as part of its Diversity Strategy.

||| Noooooooooo!! Christopher Meloni leaves Law & Order: SVU after eleven years.

||| Oprah Winfrey signs off quietly, after quarter of a century. (The Guardian)

<<< Review: The Apprentice, episode 4. "Lord Sugar rocks up in his big Rolls. They are there because there is a statue of Aphrodite, who is the goddess of beauty, and and their task is about beauty. See what he did there?" (The Guardian)

...And here, plenty of shots of the male model with those succulent nipples!

>>> Review: Doctor Who - Frontios (1984). "Frontios momentarily reminded us that Doctor Who could still be scary, witty and a little bit grim in the early 1980s."

||| Review: Doctor Who - The Rebel Flesh. "...turns out to be a far better Doctor Who story than Graham's 2006 effort [Fear Her]."

||| Doctor Who - the top ten female assistants (according to The Telegraph).

||| New trailer released for the forthcoming season of Torchwood...

MUSIC

||| Raz B rumoured to be allegedly wanted in China for supposedly molesting and peeing on 15-year-old boy.

<<< Perk of the job: Nicki Minaj's band of brothers.

||| JLS show off their muscles, Marvin feels up Oritse.

>>> Barack Obama is confronted with an alien life form in Ireland.

||| Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and songwriter, is dead. He was 62.

THE SEX BIZ

<<< Bel Ami boys descend on US for Fleshjack promotional work. A few more shots of their tour here.

||| Brent Corrigan sings!

>>> Titan Media becomes one of the first all-male studios to stream its content to television sets via Apple Airplay. (The Adams Report)

MANIKINS

||| Boys Love, an editorial by Michael Roberts for OUT Magazine:

||| Below: Zack Clark, by Syed Kazmi; Jonatas Faro, by Gui Paganini; and Daniel Garofali, by Nicholas Andrews.

||| Below: Emmanuel, by Zeb Daemen; Alejandro Guinot, by Miguel A. Fernández; and Eliéser Ambrósio by Janna de Francisco and Tiago Farina.

||| Below: Vince Azzopardi, by Jenn Hoffman; Gavin, by Cameron McNee; and Andreas Sgourdos, by Ray John Pila.

||| Below: David Agbodji, by Albert Watson; Nils Butler, by Cliff Watts; and Vinicius Almeida, by Gabriel Bonfim.

||| Below: Renato Ferreira, by Sean P Watters; David Varcoe, by Enokae; and Daniel Garofali, by Exterface.

||| Below: Steve Boyd, by Greg Vaughan.

||| Above: Luis Perrusquia, by Rick Day; Erotic Batman, by Giuliano Bekor; and below, Leo Peixoto, by Eduardo Rezende.

SPORT

<<< NBA star Joakim Noah shouts "faggot" during game...

...And cops $US50,000 fine as a result.

||| Gay sports community buoyed by unprecedented support...

...So has 2011 seen growing acceptance for gay athletes?

||| But the real test is still to come on gays in sports, veteran sports columnist Shaun Powell writes.

||| Croatian soccer federation president Vlatko Markovic appeals against his $US14,100 fine for anti-gay slurs.

||| Football fan sites swamped with homophobia.

<<< David Oliver (and his insanely huge shoulders) loses to Chinese track star Liu Xiang.

<<< Chuck Dima, the gay softball pioneer, is dead. He was 81.

...AND FINALLY

||| Literally Unbelievable! Stories from The Onion, as interpreted by Facebook. Prepare to witness the dumbest people on the planet.

||| Where is this train going, and how can I get on it?

||| And if half-naked young sailors climbing a greasy pole is your cup of tea (and let's face it, why wouldn't it be?) here's a gallery of pictures from the annual Herndon Climb, an old US Navy tradition where a pack of crazed plebes climb all over each other to get to the top of a greased-up granite obelisk. And then hit the showers afterwards...

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

Issue 97: 21-27 May 2011

||| Read the last edition.

||| Remember what was going on this time last year? No? How about a reminder? Read Issue 65.

Cover photo: Maurice Murrell.

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© 2011