the destination for the
week's essential news
and pop culture stories,
with a gay bias.
Ponder This ||| Why do kids anger so many gay men? "For some reason, gays with kids tend to rouse the ire of some gays without kids. Why is that?"
> Gay nightlife is dead — long live gay nightlife. "Some say the gay party scene is dying out, but others say it's just evolving to meet the needs of its audience."||| Straight men now feel the need to say "no homo" when discussing emotions.
||| When black lesbians are killed by black men.
||| The U.S. has a designated celebration for about every group, but if you're of mixed heritage, you're on your own.> Spike Lee rails against gentrification... But could it be that his posturing on the issue helps no one?
||| Thought class was dead? Read Richard Hoggart. "Social media fuels the myth that everyone has an equal voice. Hoggart knew the truth, that power lies with those who have the education and the contacts."
||| Sure, rudeness may be a first-world problem. But there's a reason for that. "Our sense of entitlement is irrevocably changing our social relations. We forget that a little empathy can go a long way."
||| Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons why. "Economist Thomas Piketty's message is bleak: the gap between rich and poor threatens to destroy us." U.S. & Canada News
Seth McCormack, left, and his brother Keegan talk about their lives with fathers Clint McCormack and Bryan Reamer. The family were testifying in the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan lawsuit, which seeks an order to force Michigan to legally recognise the 300 gay and lesbian marriages performed 22nd March - the day after the historic ruling that struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage and adoption. More at the Detroit News. More on the amazing McCormack family here.
||| US advocate for homeless gay youth writes a public letter to Pope Francis.
> Four Oregon City students respond to national anti-bullying "Day of Silence" with their own protest.
||| Black Tea Party activist Mary Baker claims "gay supremacism" is worse than the white supremacist movement.
< This is Anita Hill from Alabama. She allegedly shot and killed her son’s gay lover, but police say the issue is one of family violence and not a hate crime.> This is Lawrence Featheroff. He's been sentenced to just two and a half years in jail, after he tried to "push the gay out of" his disabled brother by beating him.
||| US televangelist Pat Robertson says it's ok for Christians to have gay friends. Gee, thanks Pat!
< Mississippi shops resist "religious freedom" law with "we don’t discriminate" stickers.
> And here are all the anti-gay haters who attended the signing of Mississippi's "license to discriminate" bill.
||| Most Americans think gay sex is immoral.
||| Gay boy scout earns Eagle by restoring LGBT center.
> America's waiters, barbers and bellhops haven't had a raise since 1991. "Tipped workers in the US make $2.13 an hour as base pay. The very people who feed us often can't feed themselves."
||| American media's addiction to "poverty porn".
||| The new face of heroin. "The explosion of drugs like OxyContin has given way to a heroin epidemic ravaging the least likely corners of America - like bucolic Vermont, which has just woken up to a full-blown crisis."
< Birdie Africa: The Lost Boy. "Almost 30 years ago, 13-year-old Birdie Africa became the face of the MOVE disaster, the only child to survive the bombing of that infamous Osage Avenue house. Last Fall he drowned in a cruise-ship hot tub, as alone and mysterious in death as he was in the city’s greatest tragedy."||| Miami Beach Gay Pride, in pictures. More at The Advocate.
U.K. News < This is Floyd Evans, a 19-year-old who has been convicted of the attempted murder of a gay man in Chester. Evans stabbed 35-year-old Brazilian Francisco Nascimento in the heart at a local spot known as a meeting point for gay men.
||| Tory Minister Alan Duncan says it is "primitive cultures" who have an anti-gay problem.
||| Convicted murderer "suddenly remembers he is homosexual" to avoid deportation to Jamaica.
||| So why not deport a convicted murderer because of his sexuality? Jamaican, and equality activist Maurice Tomlinson explains: "The situation for LGBT Jamaicans largely depends on class. If you are what is called a 'rich queen' (i.e., have a job, live in a gated community, and can afford to take cabs or use private transportation to get around) you may be able to insulate yourself from the worse physical attacks. However, you will still face verbal and psychological abuse, and possibly vulgar death threats. However, if you are less affluent you are more likely to be the subject of savage homophobic violence, especially if you can't 'pass' for straight. This person has been out of Jamaica for 10 years. He may not know how to adapt to the 'code' of conduct required for LGBT people in Jamaica. Therefore, in my opinion, returning him to Jamaica may pose a real risk to his life."
||| The bananas world of supermarket pricing.
< NORTHERN IRELAND: Gay equality campaigner Terry McCartney dies from fatal overdose hours after anti-gay assault.
||| NORTHERN IRELAND: Politicians make third bid to legalise same-sex marriage, following England, Wales and Scotland.
Europe News ||| SPAIN: The first old people's home for gay pensioners is to open in a converted hotel in Madrid.
> ROMANIA: Priest Iulian Capsali becomes politician to "destroy" gay culture in Europe.
||| RUSSIA: New HIV infections explodes as Putin eschews "western" science.
||| TURKEY: Plans to segregate gay prisoners alarms human rights activists.
< TURKEY: The Islamic sex cult (a "sexed-up, Disney version of Islam") supporting Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
||| MALTA: Civil unions now allowed for gay couples.
Latin America News
> BRAZIL: Stores are selling T-shirts emblazoned with homophobic slogans in the run up to the World Cup.
Africa News
||| It is homophobia, not homosexuality, that is alien to traditional African culture. "Gay rights are in crisis across Africa, yet diverse sexual practices and identities have always existed in these societies."||| ETHIOPIA: Anti-gay march in Addis Ababa scrapped in rare gay equality victory.
< NAMIBIA: Gay Ugandans fleeing persecution to be denied refugee status.
||| UGANDA: 24-year-old Kim Mukisa, and 19-year-old Jackson Mukasa, will be the first people to face trial since the new anti-gay law was passed.
||| UGANDA: Hakim's story. The teen kicked out of his home, jailed and tortured for being gay.
||| NIGERIA: 14-year-old child bride poisons wedding feast, killing the 35-year-old groom she didn't want to marry.
||| ZIMBABWE: President Robert Mugabe threatens unspecified action against gay equality groups and their allies, and promises to expel gay foreign diplomats.
Asia News ||| INDIA: 21-year-old gay college student arrested for murdering man who refused to have sex with him.
> BANGLADESH: First gay pride held "surreptitiously" in Dhaka.
||| PHILIPPINES: The academic director of St. John Bosco Institute of Arts and Sciences, Faustino Ticman Jr., has been arrested for having oral sex with a teenage student in exchange for a passing grade.
||| VIETNAM: Legislators poised to recognise marriage among same-sex couples.
||| CHINA: Censors clamp down on gay Sherlock fan fiction.
 |
| THE BIG PICTURE: Passengers are rescued from the sinking Sewol ferry off the coast of South Korea. Hundreds of passengers - most of them school children - are still missing. |
< AUSTRALIA: This is Felipe Flores. He was murdered in 1991, but his killer was never found - until now. Paul Armstrong, who was convicted of raping another man in 1992, has been found guilty of Flores' murder. Armstrong claims Flores told him he was HIV-positive after they had sex.
||| AUSTRALIA: Australia's sick and proud message to the world: refugees are going to suffer. "You might think that, now that desperate asylum seekers have been killed or severely injured in an Australian-run camp, we cannot possibly sink any lower. That’s unfortunately not true."
Middle East News ||| BRUNEI: Death by stoning for sexual crimes, including gay sex, or even declaring oneself "non-Muslim", to be enforced.
||| EGYPT: Gay community fears crackdown by new authoritarian government.
> IRAQ: Child marriage, marital rape to be legalised by parliament.
Art
< Finnish postal service to issue new set of stamps celebrating "one of the most well-known Finnish artists around the world": Tom of Finland.
> Burning out. "Much has been written about the heroin-linked death of Jean-Michel Basquiat. But one voice was missing—that of the wildly talented, wildly extravagant painter himself. Anthony Haden-Guest interviewed America’s foremost black artist in the last stages of his blazing trail, as he careened between art dealers and drug dealers."
< Artist Gonzalo Orquin’s photographs of gay couples kissing in Rome’s Catholic churches get New York exhibit, despite Vatican threat.
||| Check out Chino Otsuka's photographs of her adult self inserted into photos of her childhood self in family photographs.< Who took these pictures of Kansas City's underground drag scene during the 1960s, discovered in a Kansas City salvage yard?
||| Artist Freya Jobbins' terrifying sculptures...
Word! ||| Science fiction needs to reflect that the future is queer. "Most science fiction still sticks to straight story lines. It's time the genre explored fluid gender identity and LGBT themes."
< John R. Gordon's writer's diary: Failure is part of the journey. "My new novel Souljah came out of failure: I had tried to turn my short film of the same name (viewable on Team Angelica’s website here) into a full-length screenplay, and failed..."
> 35 Audre Lorde quotes to live by.
> 35 Audre Lorde quotes to live by.
||| The futility of chasing a "successful" writing career.
< 25 books that tell you everything you need to know about New York.> Miwk Publishing to release Wallowing in Our Own Weltschmerz, a tongue-in-cheek guide to the stories behind the stories of the Seventh Doctor.
||| Talking to Andrew Cartmel about the re-release of his memoir of editing Doctor Who in the late 1980s.< Book review: Paris Is Burning, by Lucas Hilderbrand. "Offering a rich array of reference points... this preliminary research is cohesive and startlingly comprehensive for such a slim volume. If anyone can speak to the lasting cultural valences and values of Paris is Burning it’s an innovative academic eye like Hilderbrand."
||| Book review: All the Heat We Could Carry, by Charlie Bondhus, "a compelling, fierce, vivid, yet sometimes understated and curiously dry in tone, collection of poems... describing life as a gay soldier in Afghanistan". At The Movies
< Larry Duplechan on getting shafted by the people who made a movie out of his iconic novel Blackbird: "The producers of the Blackbird movie are refusing to pay me. Just sort of shrugged and said they didn't have the money on hand, and they'll get to me when they can; safe in the assumption that it would cost more to sue them than they actually owe me. Ain't that some s**t?" Blackbird was produced by Patrik-Ian Polk.
> Noah's Arc star Darryl Stephens' new picture, Welcome, Sinners, is "An Affair To Remember," says director (and fellow Noah's Arc cast member Doug Spearman), "the forbidden love story and the choices you have to make."
< Queer As Folk star Randy Harrison is one of the leads in new picture Such Good People, a contemporary screwball comedy, about a couple, Harrison, and Michael Urie (Ugly Betty), who find a million dollars while housesitting.||| X-Men director Bryan Singer accused of raping a teenager at "a string of Hollywood pool parties". Michael Egan, now 31, claims the attacks took place in California and Hawaii in the late 1990s.
> Singer's pool parties are, apparently, infamous, with "white twinks, coke and meth... falling from the sky". Michael K at Dlisted has plenty to say about it: "I first heard about Bryan Singer’s “infamous” coke and twink pool parties when I was 18 and was at some party in Orange County that a bunch of dancers from Disneyland were at..."||| So why did Egan wait a decade to speak out. He explains.
||| Screenwriter (and boyfriend of Tom Daley) Dustin Lance Black hits back at Pasadena City College for "slut shaming" him.< Colin Firth describes Rupert Everett as "incredibly unpleasant" during filming of 1984's Another Country.
> 1995 off-Broadway play Burning Blue, about Navy fighter pilots who fall in love under Don't Ask, Don't Tell, hits the big screen in June.||| The 14 best new gay movies on Netflix streaming.
< 25 incredibly tough movies for extreme viewers. Left, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.
||| Hollywood can't handle rape.
> Film review: Time Is Illmatic. "Twenty years on, Nas and his landmark debut album get the retrospective treatment in a smart, tightly focused documentary."
< Don't miss these evocative costume test photos from famous films.> 10 fascinating fictional cities in film.
||| Barbra Streisand rejects author Larry Kramer's claim that she lacked the burning passion to get heavy-hitting AIDS drama The Normal Heart made.
||| Here's the first full trailer for A Normal Heart.
Telly Addicts < Comedian Alan Carr hits back at criticism of his PETA ad: "The 'fairy' in the @Peta campaign refers to my 'Tooth Fairy' DVD that's all. Take my advice if you act like a victim you get treated like 1...Don't worry twitter they'll be another bandwagon you can jump on in a minute zzzzzzzzzzzzzz...Hey and before all you oh so worthy gays get back on your high horse the most homophobia I get is from gays. #selfloathing".
||| Andrew Sullivan's offensive Looking review, and the problem with fighting over "real" depictions of gay men.||| Logo’s trans issues go way beyond Rupaul’s Drag Race.
> B. Scott to appeal ruling finding BET didn't discriminate.||| Modern Family's Jesse Tyler Ferguson talks about life as a newlywed.
< Doogie Howser, M.D. Neil Patrick Harris has a huge snake in his pants.
> Law & Order: SVU future "in doubt" as renewal deadline looms. But BD Wong is to return in the current season as Dr. George Huang.
< Gay news anchor Don Lemon was a model.
||| The sad truth about why people dismiss Bill Cosby’s accusers.
||| Gays of our lives: The latest from our favourite gays in soaps, with Anthony D. Langford.
> EastEnders releases 2014 cast photo, and releases epic trailer for its Who Killed Lucy Beale? whodunnit. The storyline will run until EastEnders' 30th anniversary in February 2015.
||| The Heroes reboot, and NBC’s obsession with its own nostalgia.
< Web series Eastsiders launches Kickstarter campaign for second season.
||| Watch new episodes of Tha Life Atlanta, and Boyz Next Door, web series that deal with Atlanta queens.
Beats, Rhymes & Life 
> Rapper Christ Bearer cut off penis "without warning" and leaps from a balcony.< Le1f to perform in London 12th May.
||| The problem with Macklemore's self-deprecating nice guy of hip hop persona.
> Talking to the Freaky Boiz.
> Talking to the Freaky Boiz.||| Three months after Village Voice detailed (in excruciating detail) decades worth of allegations of R. Kelly’s alleged sexual abuse of underage girls, it's business as usual. So why does he keep getting away with it?
< Does J.Lo’s I Luh Ya Papi successfully critique objectification of women?
||| Was Frank Ocean right to screw over Chipotle — and brag about it on Tumblr?
||| Tyler, The Creator is not a naïve "kid" — chaos is his brand.
||| 15 of the best southern hip-hop songs of the ’00s.
||| Why are we laughing at Billy Corgan’s sad decline?
||| Prince re-signs with "slave" label Warner Bros Records.
||| Don’t stop ‘til you earn enough: The bullshit of the posthumous Michael Jackson album.
||| Videos: Chris Brown - Don't Be Gone To Long; Tyrese, Tank and, of course, Ginuwine perform '90s sex classic Pony; Freaky Boiz - Jockin Em'; and Christianoshi - Trust (starring former porn star Tyler Johnson).
Sex ||| When HIV is a turn-on. "A new gay porn film courts controversy by fetishizing positive performers, and hinting at the risk of transmission..."
...This, of course, refers to Treasure Island Media's latest feature, Viral Loads, which "is all about fetishizing poz cum. And bug-chasing. And nihilism".
< Former CocoDorm model Snow Bunni talks from his hospital bed about developing "full-blown AIDS".
||| Commentators on social media and blogs alike have blamed his infection on Flava Works, the studio for whom Snow Bunni performed. The blame seems misplaced, since Snow Bunni always appeared in the company's CocoDorm/Thugboy brands, where condoms are always used. We asked Flava Works about it, and they told us: "When he worked for us five years ago, he tested negative and never performed any bareback or unsafe sex activities. We're sympathetic and supportive of his battle ahead."
||| Legendary director Chi Chi LaRue chats to RuPaul about "where the porn industry is going, the movie Chi Chi is working on now, what the internet is doing to the adult film industry, VHS hold-outs, barebacking, gay for pay, advice for young performers who want to get into the business, what adult performers get paid, and the movie Chi Chi wants to represent his whole career".
> Finally, two of the hottest porn stars in the industry right now come together: Diego Lauzen and Marco Rubi.< Here's David McIntosh walking in the street.
Arena
> Newly out baller Derrick Gordon's family has "mixed" reaction to his coming out. Gordon says he "cried most nights" before he came out.
||| "Don’t wait until you’re 35 or 40-years-old and done playing the sport that you love. Because it’s stressful to live that way," Derrick Gordon advises other gay athletes.
||| When five members of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church showed up to demonstrate against Derrick Gordon, they were swamped by 1500 University of Massachussets Amherst students, who staged their own demonstration in support of the newly out player.
< Multiple NFL teams express interest in newly out player Michael Sam.||| Reaction to Michael Sam coming out is as much about race as homophobia. "Michael Sam doesn't conform to what the white dominated media and entertainment corporations are used to. It scares them."
||| Wade Davis wonders why is everyone so afraid of the NFL's first openly gay star?
> Roy Simmons, one of the few NFL players to have publicly come out as gay after retiring, is dead. He was 57.
||| The NFL cares more about its image than addressing racism on the field. "Penalising players for using the n-word while allowing the Washington Redskins to retain its name reeks of hypocrisy."
< UFC light-heavyweight champion Jon Jones didn't make anti-gay comments, was "hacked".
||| Gay and straight football fans alike team up to demand the World Cup be stripped from Russia.
> Football player Didier Drogba launches his own underwear range......Whilst former footballer Stuart Tomlinson (left) flaunts it for Men's Health.
< 16-year-old Rajib Roy (whose mother is a prostitute, the Daily Mail gleefully explains) to leave his West Bengal slum to train with Manchester United. A world of roasting and hair product awaits. The Human Body
> A veteran of Act Up takes issue with the profusion of movies and books memorialising our "bravest generation".
||| Do I need to get the meningitis vaccine?
||| This video might save your life: How to check your balls for cancer.
||| What exactly is that in your tasty takeaway? A lot of the time, not what you think.
> The Ism and the alcohol. "We need more addiction narratives. We need different addiction narratives. We need ones that represent a wider breadth of experiences, that don’t rely on shock value or cool-kid points or the mainstream American thirst for sensationalism and redemption. We need to tell stories that are unsexy, unmarketable, messy. We need to tell stories that don’t end."
Planet Earth
||| Juiced! Florida orange production at the lowest point in 30 years thanks to rare bacteria.
< Should we farm elephants for their tusks to save them from poaching?
> This is a picture of a snake with a centipede halfway out of its belly. You're welcome.
 |
| THE BIG PICTURE: The sun sets on the savannah after six days of constant rain - creating a radiant pink cloud above a small herd of giraffe in the Okavango Delta, Botswana. |
Inside The Spaceship
||| Beware the WhatsApp hype: Mark Zuckerberg is no benevolent overlord. "What’s Facebook really up to? Same thing Silicon Valley does with every big deal, people: try to take over the world."
||| Contact lenses with cameras built in? Creepy.
And Whilst You're
Thinking About That, Think
About This
< The ghastly trend is "guided by evolution", apparently.
||| You too could own a Limited Edition Tom of Finland Cross-stitch Kit.
||| And finally, Walter ponders on Snow Bunni's shock video; Andrew asks, "Am I a top or a bottom?" We answer: in our dreams, you never disappoint. Rogue "Marbie" Scott reveals why he carries sanitary towels; and Chloe reflects on, er, "E-Aster".
||| And finally, Walter ponders on Snow Bunni's shock video; Andrew asks, "Am I a top or a bottom?" We answer: in our dreams, you never disappoint. Rogue "Marbie" Scott reveals why he carries sanitary towels; and Chloe reflects on, er, "E-Aster".
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© 2014
Postcript
"You know, we might just as well not have
bothered to come. The whole thing's been ridiculous."
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