KAOS: #105

a news compendium

with a gay bias
issue 105 | December 2011 | FREE

<<< Meet Brazilian twins Marcos and Márcio Patriota. Just because.

||| 2011: A good year to be gay. "From marriage equality to the end of don't ask, don't tell, this has been an extraordinary year. Here, Aaron Hicklin, editor-in-chief of Out magazine, looks forward to the end of gay culture." (The Guardian)

||| Can you be gay and Muslim?

NORTH AMERICA & CANADA

<<< Terrence Chappell on being young, black and gay in Chicago.

>>> Twin boys become brother and sister.

||| Tyler Clementi told his parents he had no friends.

||| Christie Blatchford, a columnist for Canada's National Post is aghast that boys are now hugging and attributes it to the push for anti-bulllying laws.

||| Johnny Robinson, a gay homecoming king, has a message for bullied teen Jonah Mowry.

||| Shelter for homeless GBLT youth launches in Philadelphia.

<<< Winners of the first annual "Out in the Silence" award for youth activism announced. Left, the Farrington High School Gay-Straight Alliance, Honolulu, Hawaii.

||| New Jersey's black churches open their doors to gay congregants.

>>> Westboro Baptist Church acolyte cluelessly protests in a Glee tee.

||| The Top 10 ex-gay stories of 2011. (Falls Church News-Press)

||| The theocratic gay-bashers behind the lawsuit against NY marriage equality. "The Plaintiffs seeking to have New York's Marriage Equality Law overturned on procedural grounds believe, in their hallucinating dementedness, that they have a constitutional right and a divinely-inspired duty to impose their religious strictures against gay people on the whole population." (The New Civil Rights Movement)

<<< The anti-gay National Organization for Marriage (NOM) is funded (mostly) by just two donors.

||| News networks "regularly promote anti-gay Family Research Council on air".

||| Remember last week's stories about homophobic Mayor of Troy, Michigan, Janice Daniels? Here's an amazing video of a married lesbian couple and their daughters schooling the pickled harpy in love and tolerance.

||| Meanwhile on the campaign trail, gay equality questions won't go away.

||| The gay Republican challenging his party's hate.

>>> John Katehis has been sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the 2009 murder of gay radio reporter George Weber.

<<< Asian students branded "Ching" and "Chong" by fastfood restaurant.

||| The gay soldier booed by Republicans says military has been "awesome about this".

>>> Sailor twice discharged under Don't Ask, Don't Tell is reinstated in navy.

<<< Time magazine's Person of the Year: The Protester.

UNITED KINGDOM

||| Metropolitan Police forced to apologise to and compensate a 15-year-old who one of their officers described as "running around being stupid and gay".

<<< London riots: Most wanted suspect CCTV images released.

||| Police test for riot laser that can temporarily blind.

||| Eyewitnesses tell how transgender lawyer Sonia Burgess was pushed under tube train in murder trial. (BBC News)

||| Senthooran Kanagasingham has admitted killing Burgess, but judges rejected his plea of diminished responsibility.

>>> Peter Tatchell: Rebel with many causes.

||| Divorce, civil partnership dissolutions on the rise.

||| Peers drop challenge to the lifting of a ban on gays and lesbians holding civil partnership ceremonies in churches.

<<< Meet Samuel Kneen, Mr Gay UK 2011.

EUROPE

||| U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights urges "countries to abolish legal discrimination against gays, including the death penalty for consensual sex."

||| GERMANY: Gay history of red East Germany revealed. "New book lifts lid on vibrant sexuality, including gays and lesbians, in the Communist GDR." (GayStarNews)

||| Norway tells gay Iraqi asylum seeker: "Go home and be discrete"

LATIN AMERICA

||| HONDURAS: 58 gays and lesbians have been murdered this year.

||| The mystery kidney disease sweeping across Central America; it's "the second biggest cause of death among men in El Salvador, and in Nicaragua it's a bigger killer of men than HIV and diabetes combined."

AFRICA

>>> South African-based human rights activist Joel Nana, of the African Men for Sexual Health and Rights, ain't impressed with British Prime Minister David Cameron's threat to cut aid over GBLT equality issues: "Cameron's statement was extremely dangerous to our movement. It re-emphasizes the notion that homosexuality is un-African or European. It shows that Great Britain will cut aid over LGBT issues and nothing else... We're also part of mainstream African society. They're also cutting aid to youth services and people living with HIV." Video.

||| Put railways before gays, Ugandan leader tells donors. "Before anyone gives me a lecture about homosexuals and their rights, first talk about railways. Homosexuals also need electricity, homosexuals also need roads, homosexuals also need railways," Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said.

<<< UGANDA: Politicians and newspaper editors advocate killing gay people. But they don't speak for everyone. (Mother Jones)

||| Malawi forced to review anti-gay laws.

||| ETHIOPIA: Gay and sex tourism growing, NGO claims.

ASIA-PACIFIC

||| CAMBODIA: The ancient city of Siem Reap is emerging as a travel hot spot for gay men.

>>> CHINA: Welcome to the ruins of Wonderland.

||| SINGAPORE: Manikins from across the globe go shirtless to open a clothes shop in the republic. Guess which one.

<<< VIETNAM: A mind-bloggling tribute to the September 11 atrocity? No, an oasis in the sky, apparently.

||| INDONESIA: Hard-line police shave punks' mohawks, throw them in pools, in "moral rehab" drive.

||| AUSTRALIA: Carmen Rupe, "transgender goddess and GBLT icon", is dead. She was 75.

SOUTHERN ASIA

||| INDIA: It won't be easy for a Bollywood celebrity to come out of the closet, but that day should be here soon. (Mumbai Mirror)

||| INDIA: Home to the greatest number of child laborers in the world.

<<< PAKISTAN: Police rescue chained students from seminary in Karachi.

>>> PAKISTAN: Schoolboys stand near burning fuel trucks on 12th December 2011.

BODY & MIND

<<< A spoonful of sugar helps your skin age prematurely.

||| Boffins prove ecstasy causes chronic - and permanent - changes in the human brain.

||| Pink v blue - are children born with gender preferences?

||| Gay culture and sex addiction: Coming out, acting out?

THE NATURAL WORLD

>>> The whole world.

||| There will be life on Mars.

||| Toronto's gay penguins split as one mates with female.

<<< 100 Beluga whales trapped in Russian Far East.

>>> This psychedelic gecko is one of 200 new species discovered in South East Asia.

||| Mystery of the male ostrich's underpowered erection solved.

||| The spider who's brain is so big it spills into its legs.

WEB & GADGETS

||| Are you ready for the coming .XXX shitstorm? (MOC Blog)

<<< The emails Facebook hides from you. (Yes, it really is frustrating. When I checked the "Other" folder, I discovered three very polite emails from a model asking me to take his pictures down from ka-os|theory. The messages were from October and I never received them.)

||| Twitter: It's 140 characters of hate.

||| Myspace drops out of UK top ten social networks.

||| Why the internet piracy bill is a free speech "kill switch".

||| Inside search engines' war on bad results.

PRINT & VISUAL

>>> New Beginnings LGBT Campaign, a calendar of homoerotic work, from Romania.

||| So - is Tintin gay or what?

||| The fairy palace made from baby teeth.

<<< Jerry Robinson, the comic book artist who created Batman's sidekick Robin, is dead. He was 89.

CINEMA

||| With just three days to go, Seed Money: The Chuck Holmes Story has almost reached its Kickstarter goal of $US25,000. Find out more about this fascinating slice of gay history here.

||| George Clooney: "Gay and lesbian people are born equal in dignity and rights".

>>> The Dark Knight Rises is coming.

||| Behold: The Spielberg Face.

||| Here's a look at Sacha Baron Cohen as Middle Eastern despot General Aladeen in his new film, The Dictator.

TELEVISION

>>> Two episodes of Doctor Who from the mid-sixties, thought to have been lost forever, have been returned to the BBC by a private collector. More than 100 episodes of 1960s Doctor Who are still missing, having been wiped by the BBC in the 1970s. More on that story here.

<<< Looking for new lodgings? The house from American Horror Story is up for grabs.

||| Chris Meloni officially part of True Blood.

||| Hulk Hogan files defamation lawsuit against ex-wife Linda Bollea, who claims he cheated on her with fellow wrestler Brutus Beefcake. Hogan says, "If any of that was true, I would admit it, and (if) I was a homosexual I would embrace it."

THE SEX BIZ

||| Red alert! Bel Ami's Peters twins AND Viking God Kris Evans? Yes, please... (More pictures here.)

>>> Important breaking news about gay-for-pay tease Cody Cummings. VERY IMPORTANT NEWS. Okay?

||| And there's more!

||| Spencer Fox returns to porn after anti-gay meltdown.

<<< Vote for your favourite Gay Porn Couple of the year! Left, Trey Turner and Jessie Colter.

>>> Meet Randy Blue's latest discovery, Christian Thorn. Oh, yes...

||| OMG! OMG! OMG! Stupidly beautiful all-American Ajay - one of Fratmen's twins - has graduated to oral scenes. Next stop...

SPORT

||| Tennis greats Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova blast homophobic Australian tennis legend Margaret Court.

||| Gay footballers should feel free to come out, say fans. New research suggests "more than 90 per cent of fans would approve of a gay player and say there is no place for homophobia in football."

||| Two out athletes tell students why they shouldn't say "that's so gay."

...AND FINALLY

||| Global cocoa shortage to send chocolate prices soaring.

<<< Magnetic man.

||| Boston's Santa Speedo Run, anyone?

||| I Saw Daddy Kissing Santa Claus...