KAOS: Issue 160: Wendelinus Hamutenya, Chris Brown, Cobi Moules, Samuel R. Delany, Doctor Who, Orlando Cruz, Joe's Walk, the Gambia, male circumcision, and more

the destination for the

week's essential news

and pop culture stories,

with a gay bias.

PONDER THIS

> Do not miss: Searching for my sidekick - a story of pure friendship.

||| The total gay population may be under-reported - and anti-gay attitudes also. Researchers found reports of both increased with stronger assurances of confidentiality.

||| Are gay people in the UK divided by the pink pound? "Is the commercialisation of gay and lesbian lifestyles turning the community into one of the haves and the have-nots?"

||| No one else can define your attraction.

||| Who pays the price for our cheap goods?

> Is Buddhism a religion?

U.S. & CANADA NEWS

> Father killed on cross-country walk memorialising his dead gay son, who committed suicide earlier this year.

||| Fifteen years after Matthew Shepard's murder, Wyoming remains anti-gay. "Kidnapped, tied to a fence, pistol-whipped and tortured, Shepard died from his injuries. Though the crime sparked nationwide debate, his home state has remained resistant to change."

< Devastating: Documentary shows teachers, jurors blamed Lawrence King for his murder.

> Gay Tennessee students accused of desecrating the American flag.

< Remember Jose Lagares (THE KAOS THEORY Issue 159)? He made his son stand in traffic with a sign reading "I am a bully. Honk if you hate bullies." Some (stupid) people thought that was wrong of him, but he ain't sorry.

> Queer Nation New York disrupts the start of Carnegie Hall concert; the conductor of the Mariinsky Orchestra was part Russia President Vladimir Putin's re-election team.

||| New York City shutters Moscow tourism office, citing Russian anti-gay hate.

||| Better to die than live in a gay friendly world, says the head of the Family Leader, a US social conservative group.

||| Former employee sues US retailer Home Depot, who he claims target gays for firing because they're considered "too expensive to insure".

< Who is responsible for the US shutdown? The same idiots responsible for the 2008 meltdown. "In opposing Obamacare, the radical-populist right exposes its own twisted ideology."

Picture credit.

||| So, if America is the world's greatest power, why the infantile politics? "The US is on the brink of disaster, brought to it by a movement unique in its startling lack of realism and rigour."

> Chicago hope? I wonder what the real story behind this tale of the Cabrini-Green public housing project gentrification is?

< This is Marquell Smith, a former US Marine who fought his own discharge under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He's the man behind a new political action committee aimed at getting people of colour involved in the fight for marriage equality in Illinois.

THE BIG PICTURE: 25-year-old Taylor Quentin at San Francisco's first-ever Project Homeless Connect, 7th October 2013.

||| LGBT History Month has conservatives clutching their pearls.

> Gay equality hero Harvey Milk to be honoured with US postage stamp.

||| Here's another gay hero, and one you might not have heard of: Baron von Steuben. He saved America!

||| Washington National Cathedral Dean Rev. Gary Hall: "We must now have the courage to take the final step and call homophobia and heterosexism what they are. They are sin. Homophobia is a sin. Heterosexism is a sin. Shaming people for whom they love is a sin."

||| Support for marriage equality is slowly rising among US conservatives.

< Canadian filmmaker John Greyson has been released from the Egyptian prison in which he was incarcerated for seven weeks. Greyson directed episodes of Queer as Folk, and the 1996 film Lillies.

THE BIG PICTURE: A "superhero" surprises a boy at a children's hospital in Alabama.

U.K. NEWS

> London protest against Gambian President Yahya Jammeh, who wants to behead gays, takes place at The Gambian High Commission, organised by the African LGBTI Out & Proud Diamond Group. In pictures.

||| Gay refugees forced to hand over sex videos to be granted UK asylum.

||| Experts demand official UK gay stats are pulled as they may be dangerous, may harm health drives.

||| Peter and Hazemary Bull, the Christian bed and breakfast owners who banned a gay couple, won't back down, go to Supreme Court.

< This is 31-year-old Juzar Adamjee, a hospital doctor who committed suicide when he discovered he was HIV-positive.

||| Manchester's gay village in shock as body is pulled from canal.

||| Last week (THE KAOS THEORY Issue 159) we heard how anti-gay imam Abu Usamah At-Thahabi - who wants gays stabbed in the gums with a "big, big needle", or thrown off a mountain - was due to speak at a London conference. The conference was cancelled following pressure from groups including Hope Not Hate.

||| Will Young calls for an end to "gay" as school slur.

||| Nothing's changed – the royals still grow fatter each year at our expense. Oh, and they're having a jolly time killing innocent animals for fun.

||| New London Irish gay support group launches at the Irish Embassy.

||| NORTHERN IRELAND: Health Minister Edwin Poots's support of gay blood ban "irrational", breached the ministerial code, judge rules.

EUROPE NEWS

< RUSSIA: St. Petersburg gay equality demonstration ends in violence.

||| RUSSIA: Watch as a crowd of Moscowites show their support for arrested gay activists — until they find out who they are.

||| RUSSIA: Russian judge strikes down fine against so-called gay "foreign agents".

> Swedish fashion company Björn Borg defies anti-gay laws to feature a pro-gay advertisement in the Moscow Times.

||| SERBIA: Gang kidnaps gay man in order to "cure" him - at the request of his family.

||| ITALY: Pope Francis has sent a personal blessing to an Italian gay Catholic group who had been ignored by their own archbishop for years.

||| ITALY: Biologist sues paper for just being pictured next to gay pride participants.

||| ITALY: Gay American parents "yelled at", refused family ticket at Tuscany museum.

||| ITALY: Barilla pasta boss meets Italian gays in effort to simmer down boycott.

||| MOLDOVA: Anti-gay laws overturned as Moldova eyes EU membership.

||| CYPRUS: Sexual orientation, gender identity added to anti vilification code.

LATIN AMERICA NEWS

||| Groundation Grenada: Richie Maitland on religion and rights in the Caribbean.

< JAMAICA: The house where murdered gay teen Dwayne Jones last lived has been fire-bombed by a mob, leaving the four gay men who still lived there homeless. Meanwhile, the Gleaner predicts injustice will prevail.

||| JAMAICA: Street boy prostitutes, and the "well-to-do" husbands from uptown who pay them.

||| PARAGUAY: Hundreds have marched for gay equality in downtown Asuncion.

AFRICA NEWS

> NAMIBIA: Former Mr Gay Namibia Wendelinus Hamutenya runs for parliament, despite having a bounty on his head. Hamutenya is in an openly gay relationship, and puts gay equality at the top of his agenda.

||| UGANDA: How religion fuelled the anti-gay movement.

||| CONGO: We are all implicated in the carnage – we can no longer ignore it.

ASIA NEWS

||| INDIA: Gujarat state holds its first gay pride march.

||| VIETNAM: Gay wedding fines scrapped from next month.

THE BIG PICTURE: Broken lives of Fukushima.

||| AUSTRALIA: Milad Bin Ahmad-Shah Al-Ahmadzai - an Islamic extremist who has been on a terrorism watch list since he was 19 - has been charged over the shooting at a Sydney gay sex club back in May.

||| AUSTRALIA: Australian Government will challenge the Australian Capital Territory's marriage equality law in High Court.

< NEW ZEALAND: So a passenger's luggage came off the carousel looking like this. The passenger was disgusted. The airline was sorry to see this.

MIDDLE EAST NEWS

> IRAN: Gays and "satanists" blindfolded, arrested by revolutionary guards at Kermanshah birthday party.

||| EGYPT: Fourteen men arrested in Cairo following allegations of committing sexual acts in a medical centre.

||| KUWAIT: Gay people will be subjected to "gay tests" which could see them barred from entering the Gulf region...

...But Ahmed Al Sa'ati, an MP from Bahain, says the Kuwaiti proposal is "crazy" and "illogical".

PLANET EARTH

||| Elephants understand what it means to point.

< Why this little guy is dying to have sex.

||| Boffins lure jaguars into camera traps with designer cologne.

||| The little-told story of the massive WWII pet cull.

BODY, MIND & SOUL

||| Disease may run amok while the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sleeps.

> HIV-positive and ready to sign up for Obamacare? Hold on a minute.

||| Fighting HIV in the ballrooms of New York.

||| You'd be surprised how many perfectly healthy patients believe they're ill...

...Maybe because the internet is making you (think you're) ill.

||| A ban on male circumcision would be antisemitic. How could it not be?

||| And can circumcision actually lower HIV infection rates?

< All this public banging on about sex is joyless. People who really enjoy each other just get on with it.

||| Are pain and itchiness the same thing?

||| Do we really need to drink eight glasses of water a day?

||| Could Sprite be the ultimate hangover cure?

||| How much can an extra hour's sleep change you?

INSIDE THE SPACESHIP

||| Protecting yourself online isn't as easy as it used to be, but it can be done.

> What are the worst technological innovations of all time?

||| Facebook just killed a privacy setting, so it's a good time to do your own checkup.

||| 3D printing won't be closing any factories down.

ART & DESIGN

< Artist Cobi Moules exhibit Bois Just Wanna Have Fun is running from 10th October to 9th November, at the Lyons Wier Gallery New York.

||| If the 1% stifles New York's creative talent, I'm out of here. "Rampant inequality is squeezing out the artistic genius that made New York such a vibrant cultural capital. We can't let that happen."

IN PRINT

> Books about gay people and their families top the American Library Association banned list.

||| Why write about the AIDS generation?

< Colour Scheme author John R. Gordon's writer's diary: Black men and schizophrenia.

||| The conflicted gay pioneer. "Donald Webster Cory's 1951 landmark book, The Homosexual in America, inspired early activists. Then he disavowed its message."

> New anthology Boys seeks to showcase the diverse lives of gay men from all around the world.

||| Robbie Rogers is to write about book his life as an openly gay Major League Soccer star in forthcoming Come Out To Play.

||| Phallos, by Samuel R. Delany. "A provoking book to hold in your hands; what should you expect from a 'synopsis of a gay pornographic novella' and what is to be done with 'a gay pornographic novella, with the explicit sex omitted'? Who would write such a thing?"

||| Watch a behind-the-scenes video on the Colorado Firefighters Calendar. Sizzlin'!

AT THE MOVIES

> Sick: X-Men producer John Palermo posts #SmellsLikeLubeAndHIV about the opening of Anderson Cooper's partner's new bar. Palermo - who is also Hugh Jackman's business partner - also made several racist remarks Julie Chen and Kanye West.

< Alex Pettyfer to star as one-half of a gay interracial action hero couple in a new Lee Daniels feature film project.

||| Does it actually matter how "true" our "true story" movies are?

||| New documentary Kidnapped for Christ throws light on the horrors suffered by gay kids and others at a "therapeutic" school.

> New HBO documentary The Battle of amfAR reveals how involved Hollywood legend Elizabeth Taylor was in fighting AIDS.

||| Harrison Ford defends Ender's Game, claims he "wrestled with whether to take the part".

< Don't miss these revealing photos of Marilyn Monroe during her divorce from Joe DiMaggio.

||| What happened to the missing 1936 John Wayne movie The Oregon Trail?

||| Talking to film critic Mark Kermode.

< Cinema review: Stranger By The Lake. "A complex and multi-layered film... Beautifully shot, artistic and challenging, both tender and brutal in its depictions of gay sex and romance in rural France and, over the course of the film, evolves into a tense thriller to rival even the master of suspense."

T.V.

||| GLAAD's 18th annual "Where We Are on TV" report shows the best and worst networks for gay inclusion - and an overall drop in representation. History channel manages a big fat zero hours of LGBT inclusivity.

< Nine lost Doctor Who episodes discovered in Nigeria. Missing for forty years and not seen in the UK since their original broadcast in 1967, the returned episodes complete The Enemy of the World, and leaves The Web of Fear complete bar one episode. Only one episode of each six part story had existed. Trailers for both stories below.

> Here's a detailed report from the BBC press conference, at which the discovery was announced, and sample episodes screened.

||| A fan's view of the episodes.

||| The stories top the iTunes chart in the UK, US and Australia.

||| So, just what makes The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear so great?.

< Bim Adewunmi asks, why wouldn't Doctor Who be popular in Nigeria? "The Doctor's penchant for poking his nose into other people's business was sure to make him a favourite in my country."

|||Which other episodes would fans most like to see returned?

> Eight Doctor Who publicity shots that should probably be erased from time and space. (No, actually, they're mostly awesome.)

< Looking back at Doctor Who – The Trial of a Time Lord.

||| What killed the Golden Age of cartoons?

||| Meg Ryan's still alive, getting a TV series.

> Gays of our lives: All the latest gay soap developments from around the world, with Anthony D. Langford. Right, Hollyoaks.

MUSIC

< Chris Brown "lost his virginity when he was eight years old, to a local girl who was 14 or 15. Seriously? 'Yeah, really. Uh-huh.' He grins and chuckles. 'It's different in the country.'"

||| Why is no one talking about the fact that Chris Brown was raped?

||| Chris Brown and a nation of raped boys.

||| A note about Chris Brown, rape culture and our ethics. "If Chris Brown had been a girl, it’s unlikely that The Guardian would publish this information without more comment about the admission."

||| "Record companies are peddling highly-styled pornography with musical accompaniment," Annie Lennox declares, not naming names.

> So, does the music business exploit women? "After Miley Cyrus's spat with Sinéad O'Connor, a selection of experts dissect the pop industry and its sexualisation of women." Bim Adewunmi says, "In hip-hop and R&B, black bodies have been naked and gyrating for a very long time, accompanied all the while by only a low level hum of concern in the mainstream media. When Miley does it, complete with other accoutrements of 'black culture' including gold teeth and fat black bodies, the outcry is immediate and sustained."

||| Miley Cyrus: what women her age think about her.

< Is The X Factor really one of the least racist annexes of the UK music industry?

||| Or is it a rightwing Cinderella story that never comes true? "The rags-to-riches fairytale of success through hard work helps to keep a recession-damaged audience in its place."

> Usher is 35. THIRTY-FIVE.

< Speaking of Usher... Justin Bieber has posted another picture of his buff fetus body on Instagram. The Biebs flexed every single muscle and popped out his abs while pointing at his trainer's crotch.

> McFly go camping for Attitude.

||| The twenty all-time best lyrics about sex.

||| Record companies will try to tempt fans away from MP3s by releasing albums in a crystal-clear Blu-Ray format, "the sound as it was intended by the artist".

< Get all your essential Zebra Katz at Soundcloud.

||| Video: Le1f is back with Hush Bb; True Blood's Alexander Skarsgård has a turn as a (sexy) cult leader in Cut Copy's Free Your Mind; The Hidden Cameras - a Canadian band led by gay frontman Joel Gibb - Gay Goth Scene; gay a cappella group Kings Road; Malachi sings about his Powertop; and Sherry Vine tweaks. Er, twerks.

||| Philip Chevron, the gay Pogues guitarist, is dead. He was 56.

EROTICA

||| Talking to Jay Black.

< Loving the contrast in Randy Blue's new scene featuring Austin Wolf and Justin Owen. Hot!

> Could Marco Rubi be one of the most beautiful men in gay porn - ever?

IN THE ARENA

||| Paris got the Gay Games.

< Out boxer Orlando Cruz rocks rainbow trunks in Las Vegas world title fight against Orlando Salido...

...Our boy was beaten, but he didn't go down without putting up a hell of a fight.

< So, just why is Jason Collins not playing in the NBA?

||| The International Olympics Committee has chosen Russia's side in the crackdown on the gay community, according to a leading member of the European Parliament.

||| Athletes and activists rally against Russia in San Francisco.

> Greg Louganis got married!

AND WHILST YOU'RE

THINKING ABOUT

THAT, THINK

ABOUT THIS

< Gross! Boffins reveal chicken nuggets are less than 50% chicken meat.

||| Do microwave ovens kill nutrients in food?

> Sixteen of the gayest action figures.

||| And finally, Martin talks about gay bashing, Walter talks about his love life in a maximum security prison, Andrew discusses his life experiences, and Davey Wavey (and his new Geordie boyfriend) break down the ten reasons gay sex is better.