Being Gay In Iraq: Kamal's Story

"They told me to take off my clothes to rape me or they would kill me immediately. This moment was the worst moment in my life. I was watching them taking off their clothes, preparing to rape me. I did not know what to do, so I started shouting loudly, 'Please do not do that! I will ask my family to give you whatever you want.' The other two kidnappers took off my clothes by force, and, at that time, I saw them as three dirty animals trying to tear my body apart"

A young Iraqi recounts his ordeal at the age of sixteen, when he was kidnapped and raped every day for fifteen days until his family paid a ransom.

Gays and lesbians in Iraq are threatened, tortured, raped and murdered. No doubt you'll be as shocked as I am, given the Middle East's reputation as a liberal, progressive bastion of human rights.

Check out Kamal and Rami's story over at CNN.com.

(Picture depicts men suspected of being gay who were executed by Shia fundamentalist death squads).

That's When Good Neighbours... Are Always White

Television is failing to adequately depict ethnic minorities and cultural diversity, according to a report by the chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips. Australian soap Neighbours was specifically criticised for being all white. In fact, in more than twenty years, the soap has never had any non-caucasian faces in its regular cast. Funny that, given Australia is supposedly a multicultural country. The show's executive producer has hit back, pointing out that, "Our core cast are from diverse ethnic backgrounds including French, Italian, [white] South African, [white] Maltese, Danish, [white] Portuguese and Swedish." No Australian Aborigines, then? Any Asians, maybe? You know, that lot from all of the nations surrounding the stolen continent? How about some Afro-Carribeans? Nah. Not in Aussieland. On the lack of diversity, Phillips had this to say: "Most ethnic minority participants felt the media had a responsibility to reflect Britain’s diversity across all genres and was failing to do so in three main ways: by relying on tokenistic and stereotyped representation of characters; by representing extreme and exaggerated characters; and by failing to reflect the realities of contemporary ethnic minority culture. All these shortcomings were attributed to some extent to the perceived lack of a representative power base within UK media."

21

On 17th July, Frederick Moody, an eighteen year old from Stockwell in South London, became the 21st teenage victim of knife crime in London this year. His murder followed an altercation over a water fight in nearby Holland Park.

A sixteen year old has been arrested in Brixton.

Frederick Moody died on Thursday.

He was 18.

Born Into The 90s

When I was a young, innocent, virgin boy back in the nineties, I was smitten by up and coming eye candies like D'Angelo, Tyrese - and perhaps most of all, Tyson Beckford. (Hmm. The things I had them doing in my imagination...)

Unfortunately, some years later I happened to catch some of Mr. Beckford on the American version of I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! and was somewhat underwhelmed by his personality. Well, you can't have everything I suppose, and a body and a face like that seems like good compensation to me. If only he'd stick to posing for pictures and keep his mouth shut.

He's nearly forty now and it's good to see he's still got it, as these new pictures over at Socialite Life show. I just wish someone would aquaint him with a Gillette.

Check out the rest of the snaps over at Socialite Life.

20 Teenagers Who Died Before They Lived

This week's fatal stabbings of a fourteen year old in Borough, and a nineteen year old in Edmonton, bring the number of teenagers murdered in London this year to twenty.

To put that in perspective, by 31st December last year, twenty-five teenagers had died. We're only halfway through the year.

Here are the nineteen boys, and one girl, who've died at the hands of their peers in 2008.

1. Henri Bolombi, 17, stabbed on 1/01/08
2. Faridon Alizada, 18, stabbed 4/01/08
3. Louis Boduka, 18, stabbed 21/01/08
4. Fuad Buraleh, 19, beaten to death 26/01/08
5. Sunday Essiet, 15, stabbed 19/2/08
6. Tung Le, 17, stabbed 23/2/08
7. Ofiyke Nmezu, 16, beaten 15/2/08, died 29/2/08
8. Michael Alexander Jones, 18, beaten to death 13/03/08
9. Nicholas Clarke, 19, shot on 15/03/08
10. Amro Elbadawi, 14, stabbed 27/03/08
11. Devoe Roach, 17, stabbed 27/01/08
12. Lyle Tulloch, 15, stabbed 03/05/08
13. Jimmy Mizen, 16, stabbed 10/05/08
14. Rob Knox, 18, stabbed 24/05/08
15. Sharmaarke Hassan, 17, shot 28/05/08
16. Arsema Dawit, 15, stabbed 10/06/08
17. Ben Kinsella, 16, stabbed 29/06/08
18. Shakilus Townsend, 16, stabbed and beaten 03/07/08
19. David Idowu, 14, stabbed 07/07/08
20. Unamed 19 year old, stabbed 10/07/08

Eric Lamar Turner

Cocodorm model Eric Lamar Turner has died.

Turner was killed in a collision after leaving Chicago's black gay pride on Monday morning on I-65 near Lafayette, Indiana. Turner, who performed at Cocodorm under the name "Lamar", slammed head on into a semi trailer. He and three other occupants of the rented Mazda were killed instantly.

Cocodorm star Baby Boy says: "Lamar was a great well rounded, goal oriented person to the Flava Works team. Even though he was with us for a short time, what a special time it was."

Heard the one about the porn star and the zebra crossing?

WHEN IT COMES to race, progressive thinking isn't something porn is known for.

In the sex industry, ethnicity generally translates as flavour, a bit like different flavours of icecream. This isn't very different from The Life in general, where every characteristic is a potential selling point - or minus. Muscles, twink, blonde, bear, hung, pierced - and black, Latino or Asian: they're all sales pitches on a box cover (or an irritating banner on DList... or, come to that, on the average Joe or Jamal's profile).

The Sword.com has looked at the 10 most racially offensive porn titles, and some of them really are stunningly bad: Ace Of Spades, anyone? How about Dealers? Truth be told, most of their top 10 isn't that bad, and I thought I could come up with some better examples, with a little research (and I do mean a little; it doesn't take too long with porn). But it was all too exhausting, not to mention depressing, a quick browse of the interracial section of Movie Mountain throwing up dozens of Big Black Dicks Tight White Asses (no, it can't be the other way around in porn land), Big Black Bananas (of course they are - they all are, you know that!), some Black Lust White Passion (apparently indicating some primitive difference in black desire) and the revelation that Big Black Men Like Dick Too (hang on, I thought they were all big? And do little black men like dick too?). And don't forget this important warning from your mama: Black Meat Taboo & Forbidden! And that's before I got to Asian and Latino men. No doubt the words "rice" and "spice" feature heavily in those categories.

What must this be doing to our youth? Is it any wonder the whiter than white scene queens on Gaydar look down on those who are not. Or that the precocious divas of BGC think their race makes them a prized commodity? No, you're not special 'cos you're mixed race, and saying "I don't do black" on your Adam4Adam profile isn't cool. Race ain't a commodity to be traded on, kids.

It isn't all bad news in porn land. Jean Daniel Cadinot was generally indiscriminate in his use of models, and his scope was wide (ahem...), with boys from Africa, Asia, Europe and the middle east. More importantly, as a European director, his features were bereft of the depressing slave paradigms and racially charged power relationships prevalent in American porn. Men were, simply, men, not black men and white men coming together and breaking taboos. Similarly, Kristen Bjorn has used a wide variety of nationalities and races in his films, to the extent that it's clear most of the models don't understand a word anyone else is saying. Everyone is an exotic confection, black, white or otherwise. And that's how it should be.

How Not To Get Beheaded In Iran If You're Gay: Be Discreet, Says Home Secretary

Remember gay teen Mehdi Kazemi, who the British government wanted to pack home to Iran where he faced certain death? After a huge outcry he was given a reprieve, but the story doesn't end there. Home Secretary Jacqui Smith has proven herself to be a true c*** (yes, she really does deserve that moniker) in her response to calls for a halt to the deportation of gay and lesbian asylum seekers to Iran.

In a leaked letter to a Liberal Democrat peer, she had this to say: "We recognise that the conditions for gay and lesbian people in Iran – and many other countries – are such that some individuals are able to demonstrate a need for international protection. We do not, however, accept that we should make the presumption that each and every asylum-seeker who presents themselves as being of a particular nationality or sexuality, regardless of their particular circumstances, should automatically be ... allowed to remain in the UK...With particular regard to Iran, current case law handed down by the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal concludes that the evidence does not show a real risk of discovery of, or adverse action against gay and lesbian people who are discreet about their sexual orientation."

Maybe if Mrs Smith was a little more discreet about being such a c***, people like Stonewall's Ben Summerskill wouldn't be so outraged. Says he: "You only have to listen to people who were terrorised by the Metropolitan Police in the 1950s and 1960s to know that telling gay people to live discreetly is quixotic."

During interrogation in 2006, Kazemi's former boyfriend named Mehdi as his lover. He was executed.

Australian wants Afro-Caribbeans To Quit London

"Let them go if they don't like it here," says Australian James McGrath. Mayor Boris Johnson's aide was responding to the concerns put to him by respected black activist Marc Wadsworth that people from the Caribbean would leave London if right-wing Conservative Boris Johnson became Mayor.

Anyone surprised? I've already written about Boris Johnson's racist views, and knew it was only a matter of time before his administration's true colours became apparent. Last week Boris forced Rise, the anti-racism music festival, to drop its anti-racism message.

Former Mayor Ken Livingstone isn't surprised either, saying: "In the context of Boris Johnson's well known past comments, abandoning the central message of Rise as Europe's biggest anti-racist festival, and now this enforced resignation of his Deputy Chief of Staff, the real culture of the Johnson administration is becoming clear - one totally at odds with the needs of London as the most diverse city in the world."

Johnson has already set about dismantling Livingstone's diverse team at City Hall, steadily replacing women and ethnic minority appointees with a parade of white (and almost certainly straight) men. In several cases, Australian white men from a country where, was Wadsworth writes in his article, "Black people are the ‘Aboriginal’ indigenous nation who are stereotyped by the white colonisers as social security scrounging drunks."

It's a sorry day for London, but with Johnson and his redneck cronies at the helm, I predict many more to come. Watch this space.

Pigs And Polar Bears II

Those crazy folk up Iceland - what are they like, eh?

Not content with brutally slaughtering one lost, starving polar bear, Iceland's finest have only gone and shot up another of the beasts.

You may recall their last excuse was that they didn't have the right tranquilizer, so you might reasonably expect that they'd have it in place this time around.

Wrong.

Towleroad.com reports zoo spokesman Bengt Holst telling AFP: "The chief veterinarian from the Copenhagen zoo had been flown in late Tuesday to help. The police 'tried to get close to (the bear) with our vet, but they did not get close enough to shoot it with the anaesthetiser. Then the bear started running, so the police were frightened they would lose control. The bear could run very close to the populated area, so they decided to shoot it. It was a security problem."

A security problem. Uh huh.