the week's
news
& pop
culture,
with a
gay
bias.
Ponder This ||| The advance of gay rights is not solely the mission of enlightened white people – so why do they get the HBO special? "Gay Inc just sold another convenient narrative to the masses. Here's the messy truth about America's same-sex marriage fight."
> How The Case Against 8 and Forcing the Spring distort gay rights history.
< Black gay men in early AIDS activism.||| Surprise! Religion linked with higher gay teen suicide risk.
||| If you’re a man working at a school or daycare, you’re a pedophile.
||| 23 questions and answers with a man who had a relationship with his mother.
||| You can go to more countries with a Swedish passport than an American one. U.S. & Canada News
> 16-year-old openly gay Tyler Brandt forced to wear "gaytard" namebadge by fastfood restaurant boss.
< The gay roots of Habitat For Humanity. "A San Francisco native remembers the legacy of his late partner, Stephen Jacoby, a gay pilot who founded the San Francisco chapter of Habitat for Humanity before dying of an AIDS-related illness in 1991."> Rob Smith (above right) writes about his first Grand Marshal experience, and the meaning of gay Pride. Here he is at NYC Pride:
< Sioux Falls Pride, in pictures.> Columbus Pride, in pictures.
||| Albany Pride, in pictures.
||| The Empire State Building casts a rainbow over Manhattan for Pride.
||| The 30 best gay bars in Manhattan.
> The Supreme Court has ruled police need a warrant to search your phone.||| Canada: 115 couples marry at Toronto WorldPride's mass gay wedding. In pictures.
U.K. News
< Pride in London, in pictures: PinkNews; Gay Star News; Pride in London Facebook; Pride in London Twitter;
||| Pride in London, video.||| London Mayor Boris Johnson refuses to attend Pride in London. Johnson previously said that if marriage equality passed, it should also be legal for "three men and a dog" to marry. On taking office he slashed funding for Soho Pride.
< Rainbow crossing unveiled in London's historic Trafalgar Square for Pride in London.
> Three men die after taking drug at London gay sauna Pleasuredrome.||| London sees "shocking" rise in anti-gay attacks.
||| The royal family value for money? They aren't worth tuppence.
Europe News
||| All the countries colonised by Europe. (Spoiler: pretty much all of them.)
< Spain: Men form a human tower (a "castell") during the Sant Joan festival at Plaza del Blat square in Valls, Spain, 24th June 2014.||| Italy: Mob attacks gay organisation in Rome, throws excrement at offices.
> Germany: They just held the seventh European Gay Police Association conference in Berlin.||| Germany: The young neo-Nazis trying to put a stylish face on hate.
||| Finland: No marriage equality as parliament votes against it, again.
||| Russia: The Human Rights Campaign reports on one year without "gay propaganda".
Africa News < Uganda: Outed activist Richard Lusimbo vows not to flee his homeland despite the threat of death: "Leaving the country wouldn’t change the plight. Right now we have so many young people who are gay but can’t speak out. What’s going to happen to them if I left? It would mean no one would be representing them. The best way to contribute to my nation is to be there, and I feel as a citizen I have a right to be there."
||| Uganda: Hundreds of gay refugees have fled to neighbouring Kenya in the wake of the Anti-Homosexuality Act.
||| Cameroon: Track star Thierry Essamba suspended from national squad because of rumours about his alleged homosexuality. Asia News
< Singapore: Thousands turn out for the annual Pink Dot gay equality rally. In pictures.
> China: They ate 10,000 dogs at last weekend's Dog Meat Festival in Yulin. Warning: link contains distressing images. Inside The Spaceship
||| YouTube may be winning the world and losing its soul. "Advertising is the big theme at the unofficial YouTube conclave VidCon this year, eclipsing the fandom that makes YouTube special."
< The "right to be forgotten" doesn't mean we should be censoring Google results.||| Just how white and male ar the tech giants? Very.
||| Could clicking on familiar faces eventually replace passwords?
Art & Design
> Meet the man who created the most iconic HIV and AIDS messages of all time.
||| Be sure to check out Seva Galkin's exhibit Russian Hooligans, at Galerie MooiMan in Brooklyn:
< Also in New York, The Fairoaks Baths: Photographs by Frank Melleno, fascinating polaroids from a San Francisco bathhouse in 1978. 12-13 July, at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Word!
||| 10 gay books everyone should read.> Book review: A Room in Chelsea Square, by Michael Nelson. "First published anonymously in 1958. It was reprinted in 1986 by Gay Modern Classics and is now being re-introduced by Gregory Woods in a very recent — and very handsome! — reprint from Valancourt Books."
||| John R. Gordon's writer's diary: The wellsprings feed the mainstream, not vice-versa.||| One weird trick for cutting down your novel.
< A history of our obsession with the disease apocalypse.
Shouting In The Night
> The 24th annual edition of Broadway Bares raises $US1.3 million for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. In pictures.||| Review: Tupac musical Holler If Ya Hear Me, a "surprisingly stagnant and flimsily strung together musical."
At The Movies
< Shia LaBeouf arrested, calls police officer a "fag".||| Ian McKellen on how Alec Guinness ‘begged’ him not to fight for gay equality.
||| Remembering Peter de Rome: The maker of gay erotica loved by Warhol, Gielgud and the BFI.
> Watching New York City transform on film. "Films like Taxi Driver and Midnight Cowboy and Shaft and Pelham 123 aren’t just great, atmospheric New York movies; they’re accidental documentaries, capturing a specific moment in our city’s history that is long, long gone."
||| Are these the 10 best movies of 2014 so far?< Review: La Bare. "[It] doesn’t resolve... troubling thoughts — that’s why it comes short of being great — but at least it raises them."
||| Trailers: Documented, the story of Jose Antonio Vargas, undocumented, gay, and excluded; La Bare.
Telly Addicts 
> So, ESSENCE magazine left the white guy off its Think Like A Man Too cover.< Brendan Fehr of NBC's The Night Shift on filming a gay kiss: "It was uncomfortable for me... I don't like kissing guys, it doesn't do anything for me."
||| The cast of Queer As Folk on why the sex mattered to a movement.
< EastEnders character Johnny Carter is finally gonna get some.> EastEnders "almost twice as white" as real East End.
< Gays of our lives: The latest from our favourite gays in soaps, with Anthony D. Langford. Left, General Hospital.
> Tom Daley's Splash! has been cancelled.||| Caleb Bankston, the former Survivor contestant, is dead at 26. Bankston was one of long-running reality show's few gay contestants.
||| The curse of the Power Rangers.||| Free! Eternal Summer anime to stream live in July.
< Watch new animated web series Somewhere In Palm Springs, about the "young, dumb and hungry... poolside in Palm Springs"; and the first episode of new web series The Out Crowd.
Beats, Rhymes & Life 
< Frank Ocean fires management and publicist in advance of sophomore album.
||| R Kelly has dismissed reports of his transgender son as "dumb s**t".> Read Tupac Shakur's heartfelt letter to Public Enemy's Chuck D.
< The last days of Michael Jackson. "Frail, deep in debt and addicted to drugs, he was consumed by a single dream: to blow people's minds with the greatest concerts ever. Inside the comeback that almost was."
||| Could the Liberace Museum be back from the dead?
< Listen to new music from MNEK – Wrote A Song About You.> Sam Smith's debut album In The Lonely Hour breaks U.S. sales records; he has sold more of his debut album in one week by any UK male artist, ever.
||| Talking to Sam Smith about being gay, famous, and single:
Sex ||| "Condom bill" AB 1576 passes California senate committee, porn stars lament.
||| Politicians who make porn stars wear condoms ignore the real HIV fight.
< Talking to former Flava Works model Brandon Long.> Bel Ami have released a new Jim Kerouac scene.
< Here's some behind-the-scenes pictures from Falcon's forthcoming feature Naughty Pines, starring Sean Zevran and Topher DiMaggio.
Arena ||| The flawed life of a gay tennis icon.
||| The first nude photo of Cristiano Ronaldo has been exposed on a U.S. talk show. Brace yourselves!
||| And now, the "assets" of Ivory Coast's Wilfried Guemiand Bony, who's competing in a minor sporting event in Brazil at the moment:
The Human Body ||| Why are we using 25-year-old technology to test for HIV when there's a better option?
||| Is being too clean making us sick?
||| Excessive drinking causes 1 in 10 deaths among working-age adults.
< Is our protein obsession out of control?
||| The science of sunburns.
||| Five lessons I learned from dealing with depression.
Planet Earth > Don't fear the jellyfish – these creatures are spellbinding.
||| The trouble with Pablo Escobar’s hippos.
||| So, Earth just had the hottest May on record.
||| America is running out of water.
And Whilst You're
Thinking About That, Think
About This
||| 11 things you didn't know you could eat.||| What is an unfair mark-up on a bottle of wine?
> Campaign group uses supermarket's own slogan to draw attention to low wages.
||| And finally, Andrew discusses escaping the friendzone; Walter has 10 ways to get filthy rich off black Americans; and gay in the hood! Plus, let's talk some more about Jeremy Meeks, the hot mugshot guy.
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