too long – he's sure to find
the answer somewhere else."
She done him wrong
too long – he's sure to find
the answer somewhere else."
Issue 153: Wentworth Miller, post-gay parents, Justin Fashanu, José Julio Sarria, Maurice Tomlinson, top boy, David Miranda, E. Lynn Harris, Sochi, Syria, Yosemite, and more
the destination for the
week's essential news
and pop culture stories,
with a gay bias.
PONDER THIS< The tyranny of buffness.
||| Do gay marches still matter?
||| The 41 Commonwealth Nations where being gay can land you in prison.
||| What Russia's queer past has to tell us about the future.
> Wentworth Miller's message for the Olympics on Russia's anti-gay law. "The stand taken by people of conscience over Sochi shames the IOC – which bans 'political' gestures while enabling homophobia."
||| Phone dating, shame, and healing. "A writer contemplates insecurity and masculinity after downloading a gay dating app."
||| The public isn't ready for "post-gay" parents.< Our Kodak moments – and creativity – are gone. "The real tragedy of the death of Kodak is that the volume of photos taken today may be up, but we are just corporate pawns."
||| Spiritually, we do ourselves no favours constantly trying to avoid boredom. "Our distractions – travel, drugs, the Xbox – are just a desperate attempt to hold off the acknowledgment of meaninglessness."
||| The bigger a community gets, the easier and more virulent anonymity becomes. "The possibility, and the dangers, of anonymity started to become apparent long before we all went online, and both have only continued to grow."||| Why we all love Charlie Bucket (and despise the poor in real life).
> In Australia, cruelty to asylum seekers is now the national sport.
US & CANADA NEWS< This is Matthew Ralston, a young homeless gay man, who was found dead 17th August 2013, "days after he was turned away by an LGBT homeless shelter over his drug use."
||| Gay man and straight interracial couple attacked in Queens, New York, as city sees spike in anti-gay attacks.||| Anti-gay Republican Don Dwyer - who claimed gays were a threat to children - crashed into a boat full of children, and has been arrested for drunk and dangerous driving.
> Gay filmmaker Lee Daniels says "black men can't come out".
< ACT UP protesters demonstrate outside the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 15th August 2013, over lack of funding and education surrounding PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) and PEP (Post-Exposure Prophylaxis) as effective means to prevent the transmission of HIV.
||| Supreme Court of Minnesota finds HIV-positive man should not have been convicted of first degree assault after he infected his partner wit the virus.> Evan Low, the openly gay mayor of Campbell, California, launches effort to end gay ban after being turned away at own blood drive.
< Gay officer Brett Williams awarded $US768,000 in damages for being outed during lie detector test.||| Churches preparing to be sued over marriage equality.
||| New Mexico Supreme Court rules against photography business that turned down gay wedding.
||| The gay Christian youth leader using Grindr... to recruit gay people.> Bradley Manning's disrupted family life.
||| How not to react to the news that Bradley Manning is transgender.
||| The dance that rebuilt a relationship between a father and his gay son.
||| Which civil rights leader and gay barrier-breaker was kept in the shadows by the civil rights movement establishment, and why? 
< He was the chief strategist for Martin Luther King's march, he died in 1987, and is sometimes forgotten in civil rights history.
> The legendary drag queen José Julio Sarria is dead. He was 91. A a World War II veteran, Sarria was one of the first openly gay candidates to run for public office.< New Yorkers on stop-and-frisk: "Out here? Nothing's going to change".
||| New York City considers charging for plastic bags.||| Exploring Los Angeles' forgotten stairways to the stars.
> CANADA: This is Pattrick Blackburn, a gay man in Newfoundland, who was beaten by a group of men in a random anti-gay attack.
||| CANADA: Maurice Tomlinson leads rally in Ottawa calls attention to anti-gay violence in Jamaica.
UK NEWS< London rally planned to protest brutal murder of Jamaican trans teen Dwayne Jones. Find out more at African LGBTI Out & Proud Diamond Group.
||| Man arrested on suspicion of raping another man on Brighton beach.
||| London minicab driver fired after kicking out gay couple for holding hands.
> Drag queen Tilly - one half of duo Glitter Lips - jailed after committing benefit fraud.
||| Oxford Dictionary officially changes marriage definition to include gay couples.||| The continuing homophobia in schools is the legacy of Section 28.
< Lord Robert Edmiston, the Christian millionaire who chairs governors at three academies banning "promotion of homosexuality", says gays shouldn't marry as their sex "organs" can't be "joined".
||| UK government removes protection for trans children in school.
||| Oxfam - the charity - blocks staff from accessing gay news sites.> David Miranda, partner of The Guardian newspaper interviewer of whistleblower Edward Snowden, detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours and questioned under Terrorism Act.
||| David Miranda on his nine-hour detention ordeal: video.
||| David Miranda: UK government given Tuesday deadline to provide detailed evidence about why it wants right to trawl data seized using terror laws.
> Chuka Umunna on Cameron's casualised Britain, where zero-hours contracts create a climate of fear.
EUROPE NEWS< RUSSIA: Gay equality activist Nikolai Alekseev thought to have either been abducted or to have gone crazy.
||| RUSSIA: UN demands Russia repeal anti-gay laws.
||| RUSSIA: Don't be evil? So why is Google blocking gay news websites?> BELGIUM: Kristof Buntinx launches a line of "political boxer shorts" called "To Russia With Love."
< NORWAY: Rainbow crossing pops up outside embassy in Oslo.
||| DENMARK: 10,000 march in Copenhagan against Russia's anti-gay laws.> SPAIN: Anti-Putin protesters stage a kiss-in in front of the Russian embassy in Madrid. In pictures.
||| SWITZERLAND: Zurich introduces drive-in "sex boxes" to make prostitution safer.
LATIN AMERICA NEWS
< JAMAICA: The homophobia capital of the world? Not the Jamaica I know, writes St Rachel Ustanny, chief executive officer of the Jamaica Family Planning Association.||| The murder of Dwayne Jones deserves the full attention of the international gay community...
...It was not just another murder.
||| JAMAICA: Maurice Tomlinson asks, Jamaica boycott or not? A question for canadians.> JAMAICA: Five gay men trapped by angry mob in Manchester rescued by "strong attachment of police". The original news programme can be found here.
||| MEXICO: Congresswoman Ana María Jiménez Ortiz says shouldn't marry "as they don't face each other during sex".
> URUGUAY: First gay couple registered to marry celebrate new equal marriage law.
AFRICA NEWS< CAMEROON: An anti-gay vigilante brigade is patrolling the streets of the capital every Friday and Saturday, hunting for homosexuals. Left, a "Day Against Homosexuality" march in Yaoundé, 21st August 2013.
||| ZIMBABWE: "Re-elected" President Mugabe makes damning anti-gay inauguration speech.
ASIA-PACIFIC NEWS
 |
| THE BIG PICTURE: A boy carries his dog in flood waters, Paranaque city, Manila 20th August 2013. |
||| JAPAN: Marriage equality? Only over the reactionary LDP's cadaver.> PHILIPPINES: Progressive Organization of Gays criticises government for ignoring HIV crisis.
||| TAIWAN: IKEA releases advert urging gays to go for younger model.
MIDDLE EAST NEWS< ISRAEL: Tel Aviv's Meir Park to be the site of first monument recognising the gay victims of Nazi Germany.
||| KAZAKHSTAN: Russia-style "gay propaganda" laws in the works.
 |
| THE BIG PICTURE: Victims of an alleged chemical weapons attack in Syria, 21st August 2013. |
PLANET EARTH > Indian parrot hatchlings in Dimapur, India.
||| How bees make honey: video.
||| A guide to the ravenous hellbeast that is the carnivorous caterpillar.
||| How many uncontacted tribes are left in the world?
 |
| THE BIG PICTURE: Out-of-control wildfire near Yosemite National Park, 21st Ausgust 2013. |
BODY, MIND & SOUL||| 10 amazing HIV-positive gay men.
< Beautiful people raising money for HIV!
||| Exercise can save your brain if you're HIV-positive.
||| Why weight gain in middle age is not inevitable.
||| Could spray on caffeine will become the world's stimulant of choice?
||| Being polyamorous shows there's no "traditional" way to live.
> "Hook-up culture" isn't a cultural phenomenon: it's just casual sex.
||| The gut-wrenching, organ-puréeing truth about the death care industry.
INSIDE THE SPACESHIP
||| Photo pioneer Kodak given green light to emerge from bankruptcy.||| Which should I leave first, Twitter or Facebook? "Twitter is the first global conversation – but it is becoming morally depopulated. We need radical, collective action to save it."
< Microsoft Tag shuttering in 2015. No one scans.
IN PRINT> Forbidden Forward: The Justin Fashanu Story, a new book about the life (and tragically premature death) of gay footballer Justin Fashanu, is out next month.
||| Talking to Wayne Koestenbaum about his new book, My 1980s. "The UPS men have always been cute. It's a talent pool — this is a known fact that they’re really amazing looking and this guy [in the book] was astonishing. That was a happy day when the packages arrived. I don't know, I think they've gone downhill. Let's just say, 'Dear reader, 1988 was the golden age of the UPS man.'"
||| Faggamuffin author John R. Gordon's writer's diary: The quiet politics of words.< Book review: Monarch Season, by Mario López-Cordero. "There's plenty of booze, boys, sex, and drugs, making the novel less a modern-day all-male version of Where the Boys Are and more a gay echo of Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers."
||| Book review: Beach Bums. "A lacklustre collection of short stories that needed to be sexier and more engaging to escape from being too dull."
> 50 essential works of gay fiction.< Vintage pulp covers for domestic suspense novels, in pictures.
> Celebrate H.P. Lovecraft's birthday with 20 of his creepiest book covers.FILM
||| GLAAD report shows six major movie studios all but ignoring gay characters.
||| Give us a gay Sleeping Beauty: Why we need more gay characters in kids' movies.
< Ever wondered why there have been no movie versions of E. Lynn Harris's best-selling novels? Producer Proteus Spann signed a deal with Harris the night the author passed away, and has been tied up in legal wrangling with the author's mother since then. But a Los Angeles Superior Court judge has ruled that Spann does own exclusive film, TV and theatre rights to the fourteen novels.
||| Cardiff's Iris Prize Festival - the international gay film festival - announces full line-up.> So this is Kit Harington in the forthcoming CGI-fest Pompeii. Here's the trailer.
||| What's your favourite disaster porn? (And me? The Towering Inferno.)
< DVD review: Tumbledown. "A gritty discussion of sexual assault in a twisted love-triangle."||| Coming soon: Tolerance, a film about "Jamaican gay community and the realities of their existence". Trailer. The Abominable Crime, meanwhile, "explores the culture of homophobia in Jamaica through the eyes of gay Jamaicans who are forced to choose between their homeland and their lives after their sexual orientations are exposed".
||| Gilbert Taylor, the cinematographer best known, perhaps, for Star Wars, is dead. He was 99.
TV> Former Prison Break star Wentworth Miller comes out as gay, rejects an invitation to attend St. Petersburg International Film Festival, citing Russia's anti-gay laws.
||| Fellow out gay actor Matt Bomer is "proud" of Miller. (But is he hot for him?)
||| Miller denied he was gay back in 2007.
< Nickelodeon star Lucas Cruikshank comes out as gay.> Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi's Vicious greenlit for second series.
< Top Boy star Ashley Walters chides black UK actors for "running away to the US".
> Channel 4 left red-faced after locating a graffiti artwork supposed to highlight the Top Boy drama's connections to Hackney in another borough.||| TV review: Top Boy. "Britain's answer to The Wire is so much more than guns and gangs."
< Chandler Massey done with gay role on Days of Our Lives - but did he jump or was he pushed?
||| Charlie Sheen - who shares same publicist - made it clear in one of his famous Twitter tirades that he believes it's the latter.> A brief survey of male nudity in television.
||| Gays of our lives: All the latest gay soap developments from around the world, with Anthony D. Langford.
||| EastEnders' Khali Best: "I cannot live what people consider a normal life anymore."
||| Why Coronation Street's Chris Fountain didn't deserve to be sacked for YouTube rape rap videos.
||| Coronation Street actor John Michie backs equal marriage for Scotland.
||| Science fiction's weirdest-looking time machines.
||| Audiences accustomed to "bingeing" on box sets are demanding "complex, smart stories", Kevin Spacey tells TV executives.
||| An appreciation of Six Feet Under on the eighth anniversary of its death.
||| Watch new episodes of No Shade, and Freefall.
MUSIC||| Anti-gay reggae artist Queen Ifrica removed from Toronto festival line-up.
||| The hitherto dull as ditchwater John Legend gets naked.
< Listen to Le1f's Damn Son.
||| 9 pop songs with secret queer subtexts.
||| The 25 best websites for music lovers.
||| Videos: Stephen Leonard - Wanting It All.
SEX||| Zachary Sire, the razor sharp editor of The Sword porn gossip blog, has apparently been removed from his position by his employers after a spat with Michael Lucas.
||| Porn production halted as actor tests HIV-positive just days after ban on bareback filming upheld.
||| You too can have Sean Cody's Aidan.> Talking to sex siren BrklynKidd.
< Talking to Robbie R.
||| Boris Mateho, the Czech performer and filmmaker, is dead. He was 35. Mateho appeared, under various names, for studios like Bel Ami and William Higgins.
SPORT
< The Sochi Olympics media to be housed in a building which screams "gay propaganda".||| International Olympic Committee urged to select Madrid for 2020 games due to LGBT inclusivity.
||| More than 100 Canadian civil society groups demand concrete action on Sochi Games.||| Russia defends anti-gay law in open letter to International Olympic Committee...
...Whilst Putin bans all protests during the Games.
> Basketball's openly gay Jason Collins still waiting to be picked.
< Let's look at some sexy pictures of newly out wrestling God Darren Young...
...And big boy LeBron James on the beach.< Meet the men of the U.S. Gymnastics team - including out gay gymnast Josh Dixon.
||| The locker room ain't scary at all, says openly gay soccer pro Robbie Rogers.
||| Team USA powers to a gold finish in the Men's 4x400 metres final at the World Athletics Championships in Moscow...
AND WHILST YOU'RE THINKING ABOUT THAT, THINK ABOUT THIS
< Fast food, in pictures.> The world's tallest Lego tower. Ever.
||| Calvin Klein's boyfriend is straight, and the worst lover I ever had, claims his ex.
||| And finally, grow some balls and ask him out! Naked Skype date! Are you honest about your versatility, or lack thereof? And Rogue "Marbie" Scott discovers mini-beasts.
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