KAOS: February 2016

the week's

news

& pop

culture,

with a

gay

bias.

photo strip post a 16 Aug 2015_zpszx5bv5jp.png

left & found

A ferocious backlash to LGBT equality is in full force.

Why the "born this way" approach to sexual orientation is failing.

How the Rentboy indictment threatens our community’s safety.

Nineteen reasons middle-age gay men need to get over their midlife crises.

On making friends as a gay guy.

The problem with the word "queer".

Gay vs. queer: Labels and limitations.

Why do so many LGBTs hate each other?

We could all use a refresher on LGBT 101. "Contrary to some, not all LGBT millennials are dismissive of the earlier generations' hard-won victories. But there's still a huge knowledge gap when it comes to history."

Can straight people be queer?

People who don't "see race" are erasing black people and their contributions.

news - america

Ramiro Serrata and and Jimmy Garza punched and kicked a black gay man in Texas. They pummeled him with a frying pan, a mug, and a broom, and struck him with a belt and a sock that contained a battery. They also poured bleach into the victim's eyes, sodomised him with the broom handle, and pistol-whipped him. Now they've been sentenced to fifteen years in jail.

This is Brian Cody Bray, a gay teacher fired after a hacker posted a sex tape featuring Bray on the school website.

Michigan re-criminalises sodomy.

Georgia-based telecom company to relocate after lawmakers pass anti-gay "Religious Freedom" bill.

And in Mississippi, the discriminatory “Religious Liberty Accommodations Act” has passed the House.

How most states allow discrimination against LGBT people.

President Obama meets gay #BlackLivesMatter activist DeRay Mckesson at the White House.

Iconic gay porn store to close for good?

The fight to get Julius - New York City's oldest continuously operating gay bar - landmark status.

Why have Democratic debate moderators not asked a single question about LGBT equality?

Without anyone noticing, D.C. passed a remarkable LGBT bill. "The LGBTQ Cultural Competency Continuing Education Amendment Act mandates that certain health care providers learn how to treat gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender patients."

When Hilary met the Trump supporter.

The New York Daily News’s war on Trump, in five front pages.

The rise of Donald Trump is a terrifying moment in American politics.

Marco Rubio's super awkward confrontation with a gay voter, explained.

The seventeen saddest moments of Jeb Bush’s very sad campaign.

Scalia was not a hero. He was a bigot.

Some colleges exclude LGBT students using religion, but students are fighting back.

Migrating to the US is already risky. Try being a transgender migrant.

Meet Mark Gallegos, Mark Bushgens and their incredible brood.

Cleveland is suing Tamir Rice’s family for emergency response costs, and the officer who shot Quintonio LeGrier filed for emotional damages. Really, now?

A black police officer's fight against the NYPD. "Edwin Raymond thought he could change the department from the inside. He wound up the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by 12 minority officers."

The NYPD is kicking people out of their homes, even if they haven’t committed a crime. "And it’s happening almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods."

There wasn't a single day in January that police didn't kill anyone.

Black men are much less likely to be incarcerated than they were in 2000.

news - uk

This is 41-year-old Amin Abdullah (pictured with his partner Terry Skitmore). He died after dousing himself in petrol outside Kensington Palace, after being sacked from his job as a junior nurse at Charing Cross hospital.

Male rape charity Survivors UK gets £78,000 funding.

No, UK Black Pride isn't run by people who are bitter about being sexually rejected by white gay men. "We then wonder why the visible gay scene is almost unequivocally white, male and gay. Meanwhile, gay social networking apps are awash with user statuses which read 'No blacks or Asians' followed by 'I’m not a racist, it’s just a preference'."

INTERVIEW Talking to LGBT campaigner and trade unionist Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, the woman who turned down an MBE because they're hypocritical nonsense.

British LGBT awards criticised for including Zayn Malik and Zoella in shortlist.

The queer shamans cursing the property developers killing London's gay saunas.

Capturing Brixton before it gets lost to gentrification.

Is Britain full? Home truths about the population panic.

How the Tories use the language of social justice to sell us social injustice.

What happens to the UK's least-used phone boxes?

news - world

CZECH REPUBLIC Officials launch criminal investigation into thirty gay men over HIV exposure.

POLAND What does Poland think of this magazine cover about "Islam raping europe"?

CRIMEA Why the European Parliament is gravely concerned over situation LGBT people in Crimea.

What it's like to be a gay refugee in Germany.

SWEDEN A 16-year-old Moroccan immigrant, who beat and murdered a gay man - after wrapping a snake around his neck - has been jailed for four years.

CUBA For sale: "Havana is now the big cake – and everyone is trying to get a slice." "Property developers are queuing up to pounce as Cuba opens its doors to the world. Proposals for Havana’s old harbour are described as ‘Las Vegas meets Miami in the Caribbean’. So can the city cope with the commercial storm ahead?"

Nine questions about Cuba you were too embarrassed to ask. (Image)

PERU Police attack annual "Kisses Against Homophobia" event in Lima.

Pride & prejudice: How African LGBT activists are risking their lives to bring tolerance to their homes.

BOTSWANA LeGaBiBo, the country's LGBT advocacy group, has praised former president Festus Mogae for his advocacy on behalf of LGBT people.

MALAWI Court instructs police to resume arresting anyone “engaging in homosexual activities.”

NIGERIA The story of Joseph, a depressed 16-year-old, who has been pestered and verbally tortured at home by his family, especially his father, ever since he disclosed his sexual orientation to his sister in confidence.

UGANDA The Presidential election, in pictures.

KENYA On the short life and death of gay Ugandan refugee John Paul Mulumbi.

SOMALIA A Report on the Treatment of Gay Persons in Somalia.

INDIA 7,000 march in Mumbai Pride. In pictures.

INDIA Gay arranged marriages are "on the rise".

CHINA A high-speed sexual revolution. "In the survey I made in 1989, 15.5% of people had sex before marriage," says [sexologist] Li Yinhe. "But in the survey I did two years ago, the figure went up to 71%."

ISRAEL Historic Jerusalem site renamed "Tolerance Square" in honour of 16-year-old Shira Banki, who was murdered by a Jewish extremist at last year's Gay Pride Parade.

NORTH KOREA Meet Jang Yeong-jin, the country's only openly gay defector. "It wasn’t until he escaped that even knew the word to describe his sexuality."

INDONESIA LGBT people suffer under anti-gay crackdown.

AUSTRALIA The queer refugees Australia has locked up on a remote pacific island.

AUSTRALIA This is Manus Island. My prison. My torture. My humiliation. "Iranian Kurdish journalist Behrouz Bouchani writes from Manus Island, where he has been held for 28 months, experiencing ‘profound and annihilating mental torture’."

The left is having a moment everywhere ... except in Australia.

arena

Boxer Manny Pacquiao thinks gays should be put to death. Nike ditches him...

...And Magic Johnson says he won’t watch another Pacquiao fight. "I applaud Nike for terminating Manny Pacquiao's contract after his derogatory statements that gay people are worse than animals."

Meanwhile, out boxer Orlando Cruz has something he’d like to say to Pacquiao.

So does Mickey Rourke! "I’m a little bit gay myself."

Olympic gymnast Louis Smith hits back at gay rumours.

Michael Sam opens up on the first time he knew he was gay.

Cristiano Ronaldo does what he does best. Flaunt it.

Sports Illustrated ask why quarterbacks are so good-looking? “In other words, the best-looking kids in the schoolyard are selected for the glamour position. They are put on a quarterback track, and by the time they begin playing organized football, they are experienced at the position. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

The way we talk when we talk about athletes is dumb as fuck. Understandable, but dumb as fuck.

WATCH Gay high school football coach Shane Wickes comes out in TED talk.

picture house

How can Hollywood really fix its inclusion problem?

Chiwetel Ejiofor says being gay is harder than being black in Hollywood.

How a bunch of white people screwed up Jesse Owens’ story in Race.

On curator/director Rick Castro's ANTEBELLUM2016.

Tom of Finland, a new biopic about Finnish artist Touko Laaksonen, will enter production this spring. Dome Karukoski directs.

New documentary Queer Japan, currently in production, examines queer art, culture and activism in the Asian island nation.

Gay football drama The Pass, starring Arinze Kene and Russell Tovey, is to launch the BFI Flare London LGBT Film Festival in March.

WATCH Outfest Fusion LGBT People of Color Film Festival announces lineup.

Shawn Balentine becomes Hollywood’s first out gay stuntman.

Fifty straight people who nabbed Oscar nominations for LGBT roles.

INTERVIEW Talking to Leon Lopez about his new short film G O’Clock.

WATCH Take This Hammer, a rare James Baldwin documentary from 1963.

Gay iconography: Bette Davis.

Happy birthday to these iconic queer films!

The cast of the new Power Rangers movie flaunt it.

WATCH Brontez Purnell talks about his inspiration and vision for his new short film 100 Boyfriends Mixtape; Four Moons (trailer); Daddy (trailer).

the box

Gay men deserve three-dimensional role models, not TV’s stereotypes. "US shows such as Looking offer a more diverse portrayal of gay life, but we have a long way to go before LGBT characters stop being defined by their sexuality."

How American Idol brought these two lovers together. "Shane Bitney Crone, the subject behind the LGBT doc Bridegroom, found love with American Idol alum Rayvon Owen and told the world all about it."

Why The Prancing Elites Project's Kareem Davis is done with putting limitations on himself.

Girls season five, teased.

Broad City’s meticulously chaotic world, explained in one scene.

A guide to Broad City's weird and wonderful world of jokes.

NBC's new sitcom Superstore is quietly having some of the most fun on television.

Bizarro characters, the story trope writers can rarely resist, explained. "Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Seinfeld, and The Flash aren't as different as you think."

Will & Grace: Where are they now?

How the $100 million NYPD Blue creator gambled away his fortune. "David Milch, the storied mind also behind Deadwood, changed television. Now, according to a lawsuit, the racetrack regular has lost his homes, owes the IRS $17 million and is on a $40-a-week allowance. Still, his supporters stay close: 'He's brilliant.'"

Vinyl, HBO's new drama, is sizzling and flashy and ultimately empty. "Set in the 1970s music industry, it boasts great performances, amazing direction, and a hollow core."

Vinyl is a corny, unrealistic, and kind of excellent show about 70s rock 'n' roll.

Vinyl brings the volume — and the drugs — but not much else.

Deutschland 83 has wowed the world – pity the Germans don’t like it. "The radical premise of this cold war drama – engaging with East Germany’s worldview – has won it many fans, but for Germany it still sends shivers."

Gays of our lives: The latest news from your favourite LGBT characters in soap.

EastEnders, black-ish.

NBA baller Zero comes out with gay kiss in Hit The Floor.

Eight sudden soap deaths that really shocked us. "No notice, no warnings, no mercy..."

Bears rejoice: SuperTed might be coming back.

Ten TV title sequences that were better than the actual show.

The BBC's most popular show overseas has been revealed as classic '90s sitcom Keeping Up Appearances.

Poignant Terry Wogan cartoon adopted by official Children in Need charity.

WATCH New web series The You & the Me; and The Day Beyonce Turned Black.

shouting at night

I’m a black actor. Here’s how inequality works when you’re not famous.

On Eric Rosen’s stage adaptation of Jim Grimsley’s beloved novel, Dream Boy.

REVIEW The Pass. "The workings and fallout of internalized homophobia have rarely been so so vividly presented. On either side of Laura Hopkins sleek set, audiences are propelled into the gap between the world that Tovey’s magnetic Jason so successfully inhabits and his ruinous self-knowledge." (Variety, January 2014)

Twelve times drag performers behaved badly.

art + design

CampbellX on queering the black British archives. "I was invited to give a workshop looking into the possible LGBTQI content in the Autograph Collection The Missing Chapter. This project is an archive of Black presence in photographs from the 1800s. This is an amazing project showing that Black people ie people of African descent were in the UK way before the Windrush landed in Tilbury in 1948. In fact Black people have always been in Great Britain from Roman times till now."

Photographer Kevin Slack on the heady experience of creating his Los Tres pictures. "The boys were in that sublimely shining space between boys and men, quite grown, lusty, and good-natured, cavorting in that careless and quick moment before the burden of responsibility and mortality too."

Photographer Damon Dahlen's photos of fourteen different queer couples in New York City.

Marcia Resnick's pictures of New York City's iconoclasts of yesteryear.

Wearing Gay History, the online educational digital archive of historical LGBT T-shirts and other textiles.

Outrage greets the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new logo.

Building the Barbican in the 1970s, in pictures.

The chair modelled on a baseball mitt.

word!

REVIEW What Belongs to You, by Garth Greenwell. "A book about a gay love so utterly specific and self-aware that it might as well be viewed through an inverted microscope."

REVIEW The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship, by Paul Lisicky. "The book is near seamlessly constructed: moments connect, reflect and super-impose on each other."

REVIEW Black Deutschland, by Darryl Pinckney. "Clever, arch, bitter, thoughtful, sophisticated, and delightfully jaded, Jeb-the-elder makes what could be a real downer of a downward trajectory into a mesmerizing performance. Bad things keep happening to difficult, petty, conflicted, vain, and contradictory people, and thanks to Jeb’s carefully modulated voice, the tangles are also human messes to savor."

REVIEW Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to the Oldies on TV, by Boyd McDonald. "McDonald truly focuses one’s attention to aspects of films that one would otherwise not notice or maybe even think about. It is so easy to watch these movies and fall into the heteronormative wormhole. McDonald jolts us out of it by constantly talking about groins and thighs and penises and “keisters.” At times, that seems to be all McDonald talks about, but, in the end, they have a proper effect."

On Little Joe, the queer cinema bible.

NEW Midnighter Vol. 1: Out, by Steve Orlando, featuring the first gay male superhero to headline his own DC Comics series.

Archie Comic reveals Jughead is asexual.

On the rag, a weekly look at the free gay 'zines. Friday 12th February here, and Saturday 20th February here.

The Independent print closure confirmed.

The Independent and the slow death of Fleet Street.

The digital dirt. "How TMZ gets the videos and photos that celebrities want to hide." A profile of TMZ founder Harvey Levin.

beats, rhymes & life

On the blurring of gender and the feminisation of electronic music. "It’s a musical tragedy that house music has, in the dance decade or so, been pigeonholed by casual listeners as “a European thing” or attributed entirely to artists like French duo Daft Punk, who (while influential and talented in their own rite) were neither its progenitors nor its true innovators. That title should rightfully be bequeathed to folks like the late DJ Frankie Knuckles, who was just one of many young, gay men of color hard at work in a late 70’s Chicago."

The man who danced next to me: A remembrance of Frankie Knuckles. (April 2014)

American Idol finalist Rayvon Owen comes out in new video, kissing LGBT activist and filmmaker Shane Bitney Crone.

R&B boys are back and these are the leaders.

Alex Newell as he releases his first EP, Power.

WATCH Rayvon Owen - Can't Fight It; B Smyth - Love Killa; and Miss Fame & Violet Chachki kiss in their new video, I Run The Runway.

red light district

Savile row sex parties: Inside one of London's suit fetish nights.

Little girl lost. "Savannah was a gorgeous porn starlet, among the first of the luminescent Vivid Girls, with a taste for handsome rock stars, fast cars, expensive designer gowns... and copious amounts of drugs to quiet her demons. When things fell apart, she could see only one way out." (November 1994)

Slut - how many men is too many?

On the time I hired a sex worker. "Though I’d been learning to embrace my life in a wheelchair — a result of cerebral palsy — going without touch, or even access to my own body, was taking a toll."

What life is like as a male transgender sex worker.

College student Elliott Vance discusses his career as a gay porn actor and escort, to combat the stigma of sex work.

Gay porn actor transmitted HIV despite a negative test.

Why the AIDS Healthcare Foundation's push to ban condomless porn in California is another misuse of funds.

Cockyboys model Lev Ivankov contracts HPV from former porn star.

Trial date set in $500,000 “feces mansion” lawsuit against Michael Lucas.

Gay porn star Vin Nolan’s chihuahua stabbed to death by psychotic boyfriend.

INTERVIEW Talking to Mike Gilbert, the man behind Fraternity X and Sketchy Sex.

Brent Corrigan hurls ethnic slur at Nick Capra, calls him a crack head, and then this.

Sketchy Sex's fake cum tube exposed.

Now bigoted gay-for-payer Vadim Black would like you to give him $30,000.

Sean Cody’s Brandon blames his boring scenes on Sean Cody's crew.

Eleven people react to Evan, who claims to have “the world’s prettiest penis”.

Porn god Kris Evans is celebrating an astonishing ten years with Bel Ami.

Calvin Klein models wrestle in their underwear. Nice work if you can get it...

ghetto romance

Military couple Spc. Shane Adriano wed Pfc. Tristian Resz's first kiss as married men. The boys talk about it here.

They found love during the Iraq war. They found home in Seattle.

The gay Jewish couple who rode into their wedding on a unicorn.

Twenty-two same-sex couples who don't mind the age gap.

The most raucous, mystical, sensual all-night wedding New York City has ever seen.

Thirty kinky terms every gay man needs to know.

médecins sans frontières

A new strain of HIV discovered in Cuba is twice as aggressive as the average virus.

Meet fifteen HIV-positive men who are standing up to stigma.

Boffins research gay men and their love of muscles.

There is no safe way to suntan, health watchdog warns.

Why eating late at night is an especially bad idea.

hell's kitchen

What the fast-food industry’s shift to cage-free eggs really means.

Why fruits and vegetables taste better in Europe.

I own 51% of this company!

Why we need to raise the minimum wage to $15.

Bringing gay power to the boardroom.

Target launches gender-neutral kids' collection.

Signal failure: Hornby, the model rail company, sees its sales collapse.

planet earth

Do animals feel empathy? Inside the decades-long quest for an answer.

Australia town consumed by "hairy panic".

Greenhouse gases could eventually heat the Earth enough to boil its oceans away.

How rainforest regrowth boosts carbon capture.

Is there a serious problem with coffee capsules?

Is it time to rethink recycling?

Why space junk could trap us on Earth forever.

planes, trains & automobiles

Uber is no better than an old-fashioned gangmaster – so London’s cabbies are striking. "I drive a black taxi, and I see Uber eroding one of the only paths London’s working-class kids still have to get a stable job at a time when social mobility has screeched to a halt."

Inside London Heathrow’s "immense" secret railway station.

London's ten best bus routes.

On the Expo Line extension to Santa Monica.

The places where it's rather hard to get a bus.

inside the spaceship

Scruff gay dating app creators defend race-based filtering.

Single gay men can now create their own virtual boyfriend.

WhatsApp is now reaching a billion monthly users.

Myspace still around, acquired by Time Inc.

The secret lives of Tumblr teens.

Feel guilty about your browser’s ad blocker? Try the Reader button.

2116: Underwater cities, downloadable meals and 3D-printed houses just a century away, report claims.

and whilst you're thinking about that, think about this...

Yours for £200,000: A nuclear bunker (built in 1990 for £30 million) with its own hospital, workshop, commercial kitchen and BBC recording studio.

And finally, Junior, Tochi, Kevin and Dammy on coming out; Walter on being black in America; Andrew on the white Oscars; and the Baddie Twinz survive drowning...