the destination for the
week's essential news
and pop culture stories,
with a gay bias.
Ponder This ||| Canonising AIDS history: What will we learn? "As we now begin to canonize AIDS history, do we as gay men, HIV-positive and HIV-negative survivors and our younger brothers, have the fortitude to look back and understand that no single aspect of a group of people — like defining liberation in only sexual terms — can pass for its whole?"
||| Why we could all use a history lesson.
||| Vladimir Putin seems not to understand what a gay person is – so here's a handy guide.
.jpg)
> It's time we stopped using the 'boys will be boys' line. "Men are not inherently violent, degrading and predatory and women are not inherently victims. We need to move beyond the oversimplification of these constructs."
||| Beware of cupcake fascism. "A sickly sweet movement expresses the desire of an infantilised populace to hide from the world while imposing bourgeois values."
< From New York to London, "urban vibrancy", the sinister new form of gentrification, welcomes young professionals, but squeezes out the poor. It's really social cleansing. Left, Su Freidrich’s documentary about the gentrification of Williamsburg.
||| On the other hand, why we should subsidise hipster novelists' housing.
||| I left New York for LA because creativity requires the freedom to fail. "New York is about success. Maybe that's why it's no longer the world's cultural capital."
||| The politics of class warfare: from Sydney to Washington, the gulf is deepening. "The class war has been won by the rich. Millionaires are pulling up the drawbridge behind them, evading taxation while choosing to share their anger rather than their wealth."
< Peaches Geldof death: "Perhaps there is a connection between this sort of grief – which is not grief at all, but drama and distraction – and a growing deadness of spirit towards others. Geldof's father, who worked to give the desperate a face we could identify, must know that this is true; and that is bitter. Instead we have this – the late-capitalist digital death, a media event so intoxicating that even people who are not technically 'celebrated' are seconded from their death scenes, to the benefit of nothing."
U.S. & Canada News
||| New Tumblr page created by University of Virginia students presents photographs illustrating diversity.
||| Alaska, Georgia, Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota are the only states to have bans on same-sex marriage that are not being challenged in the courts.||| Chick-Fil-A hoping NYC will forget that whole hating-gays thing.
> Rightwing mouthpiece Linda Harvey says homeless gay teens only have themselves to blame.
< Canadian man robbed, assaulted and raped at gunpoint by man he met on hook-up app Grindr.
> Quan Nguyen, the Vietnamese gay equality activist, is dead. He was 45.||| The Nazis "were creating a homosexual special race", anti-gay activist Rick Wiles claims.
< The heir, the judge and the homeless mom: America's prison bias for the 1%. "A DuPont trust-fund creep gets probation. A black woman looking for a job cries in jail for a week. Something's wrong here."
> Obama, deporter-in-chief: the shame of immigration policy, one family at a time. "More than 2m immigrants kicked out. The vast majority of cases from minor crimes. All this for parents who want to see their American kids grow up?"||| Thought money could buy an American election? You ain't seen nothin' yet.
||| Why is the US a decade behind Europe on chip and PIN cards?
U.K. News < This is Alain Kouayep Tchatchue, a blind, bisexual asylum seeker from Cameroon who claims he was beaten by deportation officers at London Heathrow.
> Meet Jasvir Ginday. He strangled his wife Varkha Rani, and burned her body, in an attempt to hide his sexuality.
< This woman alleges she found a "hardcore gay porn" DVD in new machine bought from Walmart subsidiary Asda. Naturally, she takes her tale to the rightwing The Sun tabloid. On the other hand, the whole thing could be made up.
||| The backlash by from Conservative MPs against disgraced Culture Secretary Maria Miller is partly due to her support for marriage equality, according to Work and Pensions Secretary Ian Duncan Smith. Nothing to do with the theft of taxpayer's money, then...
> Gay politician Nigel Evans cleared of all charges of rape - but the Conservative MP still admitted to making "drunken passes" to much younger men working under him. Welcome to Westminster, where lecherous shysters get pissed at our expense. A new report reveals the House of Commons is "a hotbed of gay sexual harassment and abuse".
||| Nigel Evans's acquittal. "The failure of juries to convict when crown prosecutors have made a decision to bring sex cases to trial has implications across the board."||| Why the rise of right-wing Ukip threatens the left as well as the right.
||| Priced out of the capital city: London is losing its lustre for younger people.
||| Yes, London is an unfriendly city – and long may it stay that way. "Ignore the people saying Londoners should talk to each other more to 'build a friendlier city'. Most of us moved here precisely to avoid having to chat to strangers."> Police officers arrested on suspicion of perjury, perverting justice in case of London musician Sean Rigg's death. Sean Rigg Justice and Change Campaign.
.jpg)
> Broadwater Farm killing: The case against Nicky Jacobs was flawed from the start, but his trial described in vivid detail the terrifying events of 6th October 1985.
Europe News ||| DENMARK: Three gay Russian couples to marry during Eurovision Song Contest in City of Copenhagen.
||| CRIMEA: Gay community fears life under Russian rule.
< ITALY: A priest (picture for illustration only...) stole nuns' cash to pay for gay sex, police in Belluno claim.
||| ITALY: Children must be raised with "the complementarity of the masculinity and femininity of a father and a mother," Pope Francis decrees.
 |
| THE BIG PICTURE: A sub-Saharan migrant faints whilst on top of a metallic fence that divides Europe and Africa, 3rd April 2014. For more than seven hours, some 27 migrants sat atop the 20-foot fence. |
Latin America News > CHILE: This is 21-year-old Wladimir Sepúlveda. He died on Sunday, having been left comatose by an anti-gay attack.
||| JAMAICA: Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller reneges on election pledge to decriminalise homosexuality.< JAMAICA: Judy and Dennis Shepard, the parents of murdered American gay teen Matthew Sheppard, are on a speaking tour of the Caribbean, courtesy of the U.S. government. They were due to share their story at the U.S. embassy in Kingston, Jamaica, on Friday 11th April.
> BRAZIL: The government has set the favelas and middle classes against each other. Left, police evict thousands from an abandoned building, deploying stun grenades and tear gas on men, women and children alike. Africa News
||| Is Africa on the road to a gay genocide? "As Rwanda reflects on 20 years since the death of a million of its citizens, a tide of anti-LGBTI hate is engulfing Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia, DRC, South Africa and beyond."
||| UGANDA: A 17-year-old gay boy, named only as "Denis" has committed suicide over the country's anti-gay laws.
< UGANDA: Anthropologist Stella Nyanzi on the very western roots of Africa's anti-gay movement.
||| UGANDA: The legal challenge threatening the government's anti-gay law.
||| NAMIBIA: An 18-year-old boy who fled anti-gay hate in Uganda has been imprisoned in the coastal town of Walvis Bay since last year.> ZAMBIA: This picture has been appearing on kaos for nearly a year. That's because James Mwape and Philip Mubiana are still in jail awaiting trial for committing offenses "against the order of nature." They have yet to be convicted.
||| SENEGAL: Exhibition to showcase a number of African artists exploring sexual minority themes despite the country's ban on homosexuality. The 11th Biennale of Contemporary Art is being held in Dakar from May to July.
||| IVORY COAST: Anti-gay attacks increasing.
 |
| THE BIG PICTURE: People unload their few belongings at Minkammen, South Sudan. Hundreds of civilians fleeing violence in Bor region arrive at dawn, crowding into the fishing village of Minkammen. |
 |
| THE BIG PICTURE: A young Monk reads in his pagoda, Old Bagan, Burma. |
Asia News
< MONGOLIA: Sexual minorities highlight the need for acceptance and understanding at The Mongolia National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) Dialogue.
||| CHINA: Gay man arrested for buying baby from traffickers.
> SOUTH KOREA: Lawmakers introduce bill to scrap law prohibiting sex between men in the military.||| JAPAN: Majority think society is unkind to sexual minorities.
||| INDIA: Hinduism supports the notion of multiple sexualities, and the Indian Supreme Court's re-criminalising same-sex relations "is an absurdity".||| INDIA: "Party of the people" promises to legalise gay sex, marriage.
< INDIA: Three people arrested for blackmailing gay hotel executive.
||| AUSTRALIA: Aboriginal mothers like me still fear that our children could be taken away. "Indigenous women have been told for the better part of two centuries that we're not fit to raise children. Time and time again, we have borne the brunt of racist and cruel policies."
> AUSTRALIA: After 20 years of steadily increasing cruelty towards refugees, it's time for UN sanctions on Australia.||| AUSTRALIA: Why attempts to deport refugees to Cambodia are wrong. "Should Australia succeed in its mission to deport asylum-seekers there, it will become yet another in a long line of immoral and illegal acts of parliament future generations of Australians will have to say sorry for.
"
Middle East News
||| SAUDI ARABIA: Thirty-five men arrested for alleged "gay party".
||| EGYPT: Four men jailed for having gay sex.
< ISRAEL: Soldiers banned from wearing uniforms at gay pride parades.
Planet Earth
||| Australia's new Prime Minister Tony Abbott is engineering an environmental train wreck, experts warn.
||| MH370: The forlorn bleeps remind us of the vast depth of the ocean.
 |
| THE BIG PICTURE: Mating nudibranchs — sea slugs found in reefs and the deep ocean — are equipped with both male and female reproductive organs, each nudibranch fertilizes the other, and both produce eggs. |
> Just how smart are crows? Very smart, it turns out.
||| Why do adult cougars kill each other?
||| Rare "goat-sheep" hybrid born on Irish farm.
||| What do baby sloths sound like?
< 2014 Iditarod Trail Dog Sled Race, in pictures.
||| In the battle for the bowl, size isn't everything...
Body, Mind & Soul
> What is HIV superinfection and how do I prevent it?
||| Can a transplant drug help eliminate lingering HIV infections?
||| Risk of heart disease higher for HIV-positive men.
||| Check out the new HIV awareness campaign, "My Status Is Not A Secret".
||| And now, penis insurance: $US50,000 if your member becomes detached from your body.
||| Homeopathy doesn't work – but patients don't want to hear it.
||| Night shifts are bad for us – even human versatility has its limits. "Though circadian rhythms can resettle fairly easily, your body doesn't like the abrupt disruption of shiftwork or long flights."
Betta Work! < Now it's the middle class's turn to feel the employment earthquake. "The brave new digital world is supposed to set us free. But if work is 'shared', not paid, who pays the bills?"
||| Addicted to buying clothes? Here's a way to help fashion's real victims.
Inside The Spaceship
> Prominent gay blogger Andrew Sullivan is "disgusted" by the "ugly intolerance" of gay activists who forced anti-gay Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich (right) to quit......But his fall happened without us...
...And in any case, although Brendan Eich has the right to fight gay rights, he doesn't have a right to be Mozilla's CEO.
||| Beware The Internet of Things.
||| Viral stories are Twinkies for the mind. "Sites such as Viralnova exploit our curiosity on an industrial scale. We should resist temptation and seek out more fulfilling food for thought." Art & Design
< Herman Wong Yee-tak's first solo painting exhibition, Come and Go, highlights "the loneliness and pain felt by some gay men in modern society". Catch it 2-11 May at the Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre in Shek Kip Mei, Hong Kong.
< George Dureau, the photographer and artist, is dead. He was 84.
Word!
> New book Steel Closets: Voices of Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Steelworkers delves into lives of gay Indiana steelworkers. Author Anne Balay says, "It’s a dangerous, stressful job. The partner knows the risk, but wouldn’t get notified if anything happened because they’re not legally recognized. What would that feel like, if your partner just didn’t come home and no one called to tell you what happened?"
< Read an excerpt from Bitter Eden by Tatamkhulu Afrika, his autobiographical story of male love during World War II.
> Indian gay literature professor R Raj Rao (author of the excellent The Boyfriend) blasts Gaysia author Benjamin Law (right) for "neo-orientalist" view, class and generational prejudice: "A twenty-something gay nonfiction writer who lives in Australia but calls himself 'ethnically Asian' voyeuristically ventures out to seven Asian countries to explore the queer scene there. The result? A sleazy, smutty account of third world homosexual life."
< John R. Gordon's writer's diary: Refusing cheap tricks. "Recently wrestling with conceptualising a short play about a gay asylum-seeker I was invited to write for an LGBT theatre event, I was struck by the supreme importance of aiming for truth in both utterance and psychology, as well as, of course its corollary: avoiding merely conventional presentations of motivation and perception..."> Sue Townsend, the writer best known for The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4, is dead. She was 68.
||| Adrian Mole and me: how this 1980s icon nailed the politics of the era. "Etonians have tried to appropriate all the symbols of working-class culture from the 1980s, but not this one."
||| Adrian Mole's best quotes.
||| Nuts magazine is a victim of our porn-saturated culture.
Shouting In The Night
< Noah's Arc writer John R. Gordon, and irreverent vlogger and filmmaker Rogue "Marbie" Scott both feature in Team Angelica's forthcoming BOOM! series of five minute plays, from the 28-30 April. Gordon's - Yemi & Femi Go The Chemist's - is on Monday 28th, and Scott's - Give Me Your Heart - is on Tuesday 28th, at London's Bush Theatre. Book tickets here.
> The 24th Broadway Bares - raising money to fight HIV and AIDS - will take place 22nd June. Left, Grasan Kingsberry. At The Movies
> Jeremy Irvine cast in Roland Emmerich's forthcoming Stonewall.
||| Talking to Brontez Purnell, the only good thing about beardy weirdy San Francisco art porn flick I Want Your Love.
< Indian graphic designer Punith Mahesh's winning design for the Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival, which runs 21st May to 25th May.||| Boston University Students for Israel hosts pornographer Michael Lucas to showcase Israel's pro-gay stand.
||| Why film's outsiders get our sympathy. "Oscar nominees Dallas Buyers Club and 12 Years a Slave highlight how films often focus on a single unusual 'victim' rather than the suffering of many."
||| Should Benedict Cumberbatch say sorry for the slave owners in his family?
||| Magic Mike sequel to be called Magic Mike XXL.
||| They're making a sequel to The Goonies.
||| Watch the trailer for Bruce LaBruce's, Gerontophilia, in which an 18-year old boy realises he has a fetish for (much) older men, and subsequently takes a job at a retirement home.
T.V. < 20 moments that changed gay comedy.
> Bob Larbey, the writer behind classic sitcoms such as The Good Life (right) and Ever Decreasing Circles, is dead. He was 79.||| John Pinette, the comedian, is dead. He was 50. Seinfeld fans will remember him as the robbery victim in that series last episode; having mocked and belittled Pinette's character, Seinfeld and his friends would all be sent to prison as a consequence of the Massachusetts' Good Samaritan Law.
||| Britain's ethnic minorities need better access to the TV and film industry. "We have a small golden circle of writers who do everything, in effect closing the door on Britain's rich diversity of talent."< Review: Louis Theroux’s LA Stories... "opened with City of Dogs – about 'weaponised' hounds and the mass euthanasia of dogs in Los Angeles – and the hospital story Edge of Life. Both have been difficult, emotionally bruising and life-enhancing in equal measure. I respect Theroux for his lack of tears throughout the two, because I have snivelled buckets."
> Gays of our lives: The latest from our favourite gays in soaps, with Anthony D. Langford. Right, Germany's All That Matters.< EastEnders actor Ricky Norwood suspended following naked webcam leak.
||| Coronation Street actress Barbara Knox charged with drink driving.
||| Watch the latest episode of Day Drunk Gays, and new gay webseries Hollywoodland.
Beats, Rhymes & Life
||| Fly Young Red talks about his music, his path from "straight" rapping to "gay rapping" and sex.
> Fly Young Red to perform at the eighth annual Blatino Oasis event in Palm Springs, "California's largest & sexiest gay & bisexual men of color getaway." Also there is out comedian Sampson McCormick, and porn stars such as Hotrod.
> Fly Young Red to perform at the eighth annual Blatino Oasis event in Palm Springs, "California's largest & sexiest gay & bisexual men of color getaway." Also there is out comedian Sampson McCormick, and porn stars such as Hotrod.
< Duncan James and Lee Ryan - both members of Blue - have separately clarified labels on their sexuality. Ryan said, "In 2014 when individual sexuality is being celebrated, it's odd that Twitter trolls and bullies focus on sexuality in a derogatory way," whilst James said, "But I still call myself gay. I’m a gay guy. I like men, so that makes me gay. Don’t get me wrong, I think people can be bisexual. When I came out as bisexual at the time [2009], it was just easier to use the word."
> Country music's gay stars on a scene still gripped by fear.||| Pharrell Williams announces support for marriage equality.
||| Why Shakira and Rihanna are making life harder for bisexuals.
< The Voice's Jermain Jackman on David Cameron, gentrification, and why he's a leftie for life.||| Don't blame Justin Bieber. Kids have always idolised idiots. "The silly child star from smalltown Ontario has no more responsibility to behave with decorum than anyone else."
||| Justin Bieber's not newsworthy, but who cares? He's online traffic gold.
||| Videos: Fly Young Red's sizzling Throw That Boy Pussy, and Kele Okereke's Candy Flip.
Sex 
||| New York City’s last porn projectionist on his retirement, and the bad old days of Times Square.> The rightwing Daily Mail tries to rile up its led-by-the-nose readers over living, breathing wet dream (and black man) David McIntosh's income following his shackling to blow-up sex doll (and white woman) Kelly Brook.
< Daniel Shoneye gets a wet shave from his brother Darren for a new Recon advert.> "Igor" from (inexplicably popular) vlogger Davey Wavey's Straight Boys Are Hot? video makes his gay porn debut on Sean Cody.
< Race Cooper, Tyson Tyler, Trelino and Dato Foland all star in new Raging Stallion orgy.
> Talking to Tyson Tyler.
< Meet Randy Blue's new, self-sucking model Dominic Santos.||| Scenes from Sean Zevran's private life.
||| Arman Woodson and Delone Dickson find themselves in detention.
Arena > Basketball player Derrick Gordon has come out as gay, becoming the first openly gay National Collegiate Athletic Association Division 1 basketball player.
||| Thoughts from inside Derrick Gordon's gay inner circle.
||| Gay ally Brendon Ayanbadejo interviews Jason Collins.
||| Football player Colin Kazim-Richards guilty over anti-gay gesture.
And Whilst You're
Thinking About That, Think
About This
< Boyfriend twin. You know the types: those couples who look just like each other.
||| And finally, Walter discusses the fact that "most black gay men between 20-25 years of age will be HIV positive by the time they reach 30 years of age"; Martin goes to a straight club; everything you wanted to know about Rogue "Marbie" Scott; and Andrew talks about boobs (and let's face it, if anyone knows about "boobs", it's him).
11 January - 11 April 2014
On the cover: Derrick Gordon.
kaos is not responsible for the content of external websites.
Read the last edition
© 2014
Postcript
"You know, we might just as well not have
bothered to come. The whole thing's been ridiculous."
0 comments:
Post a Comment