2 June

Saturday 2 June 2012

From We the Outsiders. Photo: Kashish Film Festival

The New York Times has been to the Kashish Mumbai International Queer Film Festival in India. The Marathi -language film by Ramesh More, “We the Outsiders” is about a gay boy who gets kicked out of home by his family but finds love and protection among the hijras in Mumbai. The movie, which had its premiere at the festival, picked up a jury mention for best feature film.

Putting on the festival is not easy. “Sridhar Rangayan, Kashish’s festival director and founder, roughly estimates that this year’s total attendance at around 7,000 people, with 15 completely full screenings. “According to our survey, 37 percent of the participants were in fact non-L.G.B.T,” he says.

Mr. Rangayan started Kashish in April 2010, with modest grants from two United Nations agencies and an Amsterdam film fund. Back then, he says, theaters were wary of hosting an L.G.B.T. film festival. Right-wing groups like Shiv Sena in Mumbai had attacked cinemas screening movies with lesbian content in the past. Deepa Mehta’s “Fire”, about the love affair between two Delhi housewives, for instance, had led to billboards and theaters being set on fire in 1996.

“We’re the only L.G.B.T. fest to get clearance from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting,” says Mr. Rangayan. “Prominent citizens pre-screen films as assurance to the Censor Board. The police cooperate.””

The Rhinestone Bull. Photo: Birmingham Mail

Up to 100,000 people will attend Birmingham’s annual two-day Pride, the carnival procession takes place today. A £15,000 rhino covered in rhinestones (pictured) has been installed in the city’s southside area, on top of Wynner House at the junction of Hurst Street and Bromsgrove Street.

Photo: The Royal Family

This weekend marks our Queen Elizabeth’s 60th year since her accession to the throne (59th year since she was actually crowned) and the United Kingdom is on holiday for four days.

Including Gay Activist, who remembers attending the Coronation Street Party and being presented with his Coronation Money Box!

We wish everyone on holiday, on Prides and involved with the Bingham Cup a great weekend. See you on Tuesday.

SP

1 June

Friday 1 June 2012

The late Justin Fashanu. All Sport UK/Getty

Who says our national game is homophobic? Nine out of ten football fans would cheer for gay players, claims the Daily Mail. A new study found that 93 per cent of fans oppose homophobia and would support gay footballers. Ellis Cashmore of Staffordshire University questioned 3,500 supporters in the first study of homophobia amongst fans.
“It is the market which controls football which prohibits gay players coming out. Almost every major announcement about homophobia in football assumes that supporters are hostile to gay players. We have provided the first evidence that gay players would meet with approval from fans of all ages and backgrounds, tempered of course by fans rivalry, which proves the idea of ingrained homophobia in fan culture to be false.”

Gay Activist will have to take on extra staff to deal with the deluge of football stars coming out.

Oink Flap.

Just as well that a US Appeals court decided that it was no longer slander in New York to falsely say that someone is gay.

The decision wiped out decades of rulings, saying that society no longer treated such labels as defamation. Without defamation, there is no longer slander, the court ruled unanimously. Justice Thomas E. Mercure of the Appellate Division’s Third Department wrote for the court that earlier rulings were “inconsistent with current public policy and should no longer be followed.”

Luka Rocco Magnotta’s facebook profile picture

Members of Toronto’s gay community are distancing themselves from Luka Rocco Magnotta, the porn star accused of mailing body parts of a man he killed and dismembered, reports the Sun News, Toronto. He was supposed to have been a dancer at a gay club but – nobody remembers him at all.

Well, you can’t blame them.

A still from “A Special Pride”. Copyright details being sought

“A group of men and women barbecue burgers, set up a tent and mingle. They’re all members of the Rainbow Support Group, a service of the Pride Center. They also have intellectual disabilities. … ‘Acknowledging that people with intellectual disabilities are sexual is a new development in the human services field, one that is still in the pre-Stonewall days for those who are gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender,’ says the film’s narration, as Rainbow Support members line up for a group photo shoot. ‘There’s an unfounded expectation that they do not have a sexuality, let alone an understanding of sexual orientation.’ “

This is the new documentary A Special Pride which is being premiered on June 9th at the Connecticut Gay & Lesbian Film Festival.

Advance warning: Gay Activist is kept up to date, and as part of that process, our daily blog posts are deleted after three months. On June 5th we will be deleting all March 2012 daily blogs.

SP

31 May

Thursday 31 May 2012

Photo: Helen Westwood’s facebook profile picture

Gay Marriage may have moved a step nearer in Australia. The New South Wales upper house passed a motion calling on the federal government to allow gay marriage by 22 votes to 16, joining Tasmania and the ACT in having a parliamentary chamber call for the 1961 commonwealth Marriage Act to be amended to allow same-sex marriage.

During the debate, Labor MP Helen Westwood described being in a lesbian relationship and having eight grandchildren. “There’s just no evidence that my children or my grandchildren have been disadvantaged by being raised in a same-sex relationship,” she told the chamber on Thursday.

Nick Herbert. Photo: Sky

Meanwhile in Britain Nick Herbert, the justice and policing minister, waded into the row in the Conservatives about gay marriage. Mr Herbert, who has a civil partnership, said that he and others of the same sexuality are effectively being treated as second-class citizens, and opponents of same-sex marriage are making intemperate and unreasonable arguments. “I am getting rather fed up with people metaphorically jabbing a finger into my chest and saying I should put up with a civil partnership.”

Condoms and a banana. Photo: Izismile

At this time of year the health statistics seem to pour out like an overflowing medicine bottle and today we are on STDs. This year there is a two percent rise in the number of new sexually transmitted infections in England: 427,000. Young people and men who have sex with men are at highest risk, with new gonorrhoea cases up 61 percent in their group. The increase was mainly cases of gonorrhoea, syphilis and genital herpes, which were up by 25, 10 and five percent. Among gay and bisexual men who have sex with men, new cases of gonorrhoea were up 61 percent, with syphilis up 28 percent. The number of new chlamydia infections reported had risen by 48 percent on 2010′s figures.

Senator Ted Lieu. Photo in public domain

Reuters reports that a bill to ban an ex-gay therapy directed at children and teens passed California’s Senate on Wednesday, moving the state a step closer to becoming the first in the nation to ban the controversial treatment. The 23-13 vote in the Democratic-controlled Senate marked a major victory for opponents who say the therapy has no medical basis because homosexuality is not a disorder, and that the therapy can cause depression leading to substance abuse and suicide. “These therapies are dangerous,” Senator Ted Lieu, a Democrat who sponsored the bill, said on the Senate floor before the vote, citing the case of Ryan Kendall, an outspoken advocate of gay rights who underwent such therapy as a child. “Ryan was told that being gay made God cry,” Lieu said. “He testified that for 10 years of his life, he wanted to commit suicide. He has not done that and now he is speaking out against this type of therapy.”

Lord Browne’s comments over gays in senior positions, which we blogged yesterday, have drawn some criticism. “Homophobia in the workplace? Lord Browne would have had an easier time if he’d been open about his sexuality,” says Andrew Pierce. “… Lord Browne of Madingley, often described as Tony Blair’s favourite businessman, was one of the most influential men on the planet. In 2005 he was asked by the Financial Times if he was gay. He replied ‘you have got the wrong man there’. The journalists knew that he was lying. .. Browne, in his speech at Arup this week to launch the company’s Connect Out gay networking organisation, revealed he had lived in the closet for so long was because of his mother Paula. Mrs Browne regularly accompanied her son to BP social events to the evident bemusement of some of his colleagues.”

Your Activist – out at work from 1976 – with no detrimental effect on a career – has always advocated openness and honesty in such matters. Yes, Your Activist was lucky but still believes that honesty pays dividends.

SP

30 May

Wednesday 30 May 2012

AP

“The survival rate of heterosexual relationships is very poor. Same sex couples are unlikely to do worse. Time will tell but my guess, from observing many gay and lesbian relationships over the years, is that same sex couples may provide equally stable or unstable marital relationships and parental bonds as heterosexual couples.” So writes Dr Robert Lefever in The Daily Mail today. He concludes that gay couples deserve the same rights as anybody else.

Teletubbies Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po. AP

So far nobody is campaigning for equal rights for Teletubbies with the rest of society. It turns out that the Teletubbies were straight, not gay, acording to – Teletubby LaLa. Great. But what about Bagpuss?

Pink News

Its Playtime again folks: The Gay Sports Day is on this summer, slipping in between the London Olympic and Paralympic Games on the August Bank Holiday. Raising funds for gay men’s health charity GMFA, the 2012 event will be the sixth annual collaboration between the charity and the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. The Vauxhall Sports Day will see the handbag toss, the 50m mince and the Space Hopper relay making their return to south London in the Olympic year.

HIV prevalence is four times higher in gay and bisexual men who inject drugs, compared to heterosexual, male, injecting drug users, UK investigators report in Sexually Transmitted Infections. The study also showed that prevalence of infection with the hepatitis C virus was significantly higher among gay and bisexual male injecting drug users (IDUs), reports National AIDS Manual. The higher HIV prevalence seen in gay and bisexual IDUs was due to sexual transmission of the virus. However, the higher rate of hepatitis C is largely attributed to sharing injecting equipment. The study showed that gay and bisexual men were significantly more likely to report unsafe injecting practices than heterosexual men.

Lord Browne. Photo: Lord Browne

‘My sense is that the business world remains more intolerant of homosexuality than other worlds such as the legal profession, the media and the visual arts… I am one of a handful of publicly gay people to have run a FTSE 100 company.’ Lord Browne, former chief executive of BP, told the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston today. He originally resigned from BP after it emerged he had lied to the High Court about a gay relationship he had. He pointed specifically at private equity as a culprit: ‘In some industries, the situation is particularly bad. Among the many people I know in private equity, where I now work, fewer than 1% are openly gay.’

SP

29 May

Tuesday 29 May 2012

Photo: Sky News

A law banning so-called “homosexual propaganda” throughout Russia is to be debated in the Russian parliament next month. For the seventh year in a row the gay pride parade has been banned in Moscow but activists challenge the authorities by taking to the streets anyway.

Many Pride goers are detained for wearing badges bearing pink triangles. One woman was arrested for holding a packet of coloured felt tip pens, a replacement for the banned rainbow symbol of gay pride.

Ed Balls. Photo: This is London

Ed Balls, the shadow chancellor today revealed that his uncle was gay and would have liked the right to a same-sex marriage as he spoke out in support of the campaign for gay marriage. Mr Balls said gay couples should be able to marry in church. He was proud that Labour had advanced gay rights while in power by repealing Section 28, equalising the age of consent and introducing civil partnerships. “And now we should go further and say to people regardless of their sexuality, people who want to get married should be able to do. Twenty years ago my uncle came out in his fifties as gay — and he died, I’m afraid, before he and his long-term partner could have a civil partnership. But actually in our family we would have liked him to have gone further and to have got married. It’s what he would have wanted, I believe.” Mr Balls said he would not name his late uncle because he wanted to maintain the family’s privacy.

A 2004 picture of Rev White in happier times. MLK Duluth

The Rev. Oliver White, 69, watched most of his congregation leave after he voiced his support for gay marriage. He is now at risk of losing his church, unless he can collect enough donations to keep the doors open. He needs to raise $200,000 by June 30. As of last week he had raised $13,000.

A black leader at the helm of a predominantly black church, White — who marched for racial equality during the Civil Rights era, stood up for gay rights in 2005 by joining a majority of delegates from across the country who voted to support gay marriage. He returned to his congregation the following Sunday and explained his decision. Almost immediately he saw church membership plummet. Within weeks he lost two-thirds of his followers, and now a Sunday sermon draws at most about 20 people. His church is not a “gay church” but welcomes everyone. He says he doesn’t regret taking his stand, even if it ultimately means the church will be no more. “I’ve often said if one person has been turned around, if their thinking has been turned around, and they are no longer homophobic, and they can reach out and love their brothers and their sisters as they love themselves, unconditionally, without labeling them in any way, then losing the church will not be in vain.”

SP

28 May

Monday 28 May 2012

Photo: Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

The New York Times has been to the Rivers at Rehoboth congregation, in Harlem, a black church which welcomes gay men and lesbians. “Ms. Brown, the church’s senior pastor preaches what she calls a “radically inclusive” message, while Mr. Tolton, the associate pastor, offers as a mantra the phrase “Gay by God.” “God doesn’t make any junk,” Ms. Brown said. “He made us knowing who we were going to be before we were it.” “

Meanwhile in Illinois, USA, measures to make Illinois schools adopt more detailed policies to prevent bullying failed to be enacted by one vote in the state Senate. The bill would have required anti-bullying policies to include a definition of bullying and a statement saying it was against the law. The policies would have spelled out how allegations could be submitted anonymously and how they would be investigated. Policies also would have been required to describe what could happen to students who bully others, such as counseling or community service.

Conservatives objected, claiming the real reason for the proposed measure was to “promote homosexuality”. As usual.

40-29 News has been to see graduating gay military students following the repeal of DADT. “For the most part, it allows us to be a complete person, as opposed to compartmentalizing our lives into different types of boxes,” said newly commissioned Air Force 2nd Lt. Dan Dwyer, who graduated from the Air Force Academy on Wednesday. Students and gay alumni also say the repeal is creating professional benefits by opening doors to mentorship possibilities. Being open about their orientation gives students and experienced military personal one more common experience that can foster a mentoring relationship.

SP

27 May

Sunday 27 May 2012

A Russian Orthodox church activist attacks a gay rights protester during an unauthorised rally in central Moscow. Photograph: Anton Tushin/AFP/Getty

Dozens of people have been detained in Moscow after Russian Orthodox church activists broke up two banned gay rights protests, throwing water and shouting prayers at gay demonstrators, throwing punches, grabbing their rainbow flags and trampling on them in front of television cameras outside the city hall and parliament. Almost all of the 30 gay rights protesters were detained, but hardly any Orthodox activists were detained.

Nikolai Alexeyev said he was detained for talking to journalists. “I am arrested at Moscow Pride City Hall protest,” he tweeted. “I have no words.” Police said about 40 people had been detained at the protests. Homosexuality was decriminalised in Russia in 1993, but anti-gay prejudice runs deep and the gay community remains largely underground.

SP

26 May

Saturday 26 May 2012

Photo: 123 RF

What? You want me to update Gay Activist?

Today?

In this weather? Ha ha ha ha ha – oh.

Eight months after the repeal of DADT, gay midshipmen describe the transformation at the Naval Academy, reports the Tampa Bay Times. Last month, for the first time, faculty members and staff attended an off-campus dinner that had been organized secretly every year by and for gay midshipmen. “It’s been really great, actually,” Bonsall, 20, of Middletown, Del., said of life at the academy since repeal. “Everyone has been really accepting of us.”

The experience at Annapolis this year mirrors those at the other service academies, but some future officers worry about what happens after they graduate. While their generation might be accepting, the broader military is made up of people of all ages and backgrounds. Some senior officers say privately that they won’t come out for fear of jeopardizing their careers.

Hamed. Winnipeg Free Press.

The Winnipeg Free Press have been talking to a gay refugee from Iran who is now in Canada. 27-year-old Hamed is sponsored by a Group of Five connected to the Rainbow Resource Centre. “I can’t imagine what would’ve happened to me.” Hamed spent 17 months in Turkey after he was outed. “Being gay in Iran is not acceptable. If someone wants to hurt me or kill me, there is nobody to protect me.” Even in Canada, he’s worried about what could happen to him if homophobic fundamentalists discover his last name and track him down.

“When I came to Turkey, two gays helped me find my way. At that time, I really needed it. I didn’t know anything about Turkey or the United Nations.” Before long, he was helping others who’d fled Iran, and shared an apartment with a transgender couple and a gay man. “I tried to be a family with my situation.”

No, it’s not the new Gay Activist range of sexy mens’ underwear, which we know you are all agog to see. Traditional Ndebele leaders at the launch of the Institute of African Royalty in Johannesburg in 2009. Traditional leaders have consistently rejected LGBT people as ‘un-African’. Photograph: Themba Hadebe/AP

Gays in South Africa are concerned about the traditional courts bill which threatens to undermine gay rights for millions of gay South Africans living in rural areas. The bill is the latest attempt to define, regularise and institutionalise the role of traditional leaders, but the bill undermines the protection afforded by constitutional civil rights.

It would grant individual traditional leaders sole authority to interpret and implement customary law. The bill would also prohibit rural people from opting out of the jurisdiction of traditional courts, preventing access to alternative forms of justice and circumventing the authority of the constitution.

SP

25 May

Friday 25 May 2012

Theresa May. Photograph: Murdo Macleod

Theresa May, the Conservative home secretary, has pledged her personal support for gay marriage, becoming the most senior politician yet to take part in a cross-party video campaign supporting a change to the law. The video was released on the day it emerged that MPs will have a free vote on the plan to legalise gay marriage to avoid a showdown with Conservative colleagues opposed to the idea.

Australian gay rights advocates are hailing a Government decision to recognise the specific needs of elderly gay people, with three aged-care facilities being built specifically for gay and lesbian people. Many in aged care do not feel comfortable coming out and those that do sometimes face devastating discrimination from carers or their peers. The Australian Federal Government’s recognition of the specific needs of the group is seen by Australian activists as an historic step that has gone largely unnoticed.

A gay marriage in Amsterdam in 2009. Photo: Reuters/Paul Vreeker/United Photos

Reuters have identified the top ten destinations for gay marriages this summer. They are:

1. Washington DC
2. Montreal
3. Amsterdam
4. Madrid
5. Provincetown, US
6. Stockholm
7. Buenos Aires
8. New York City
9. Reykjavik, Iceland
10. Oslo, Norway

Your Activist notes that both San Francisco and Dagenham are missing from the list, for some inexplicable reason.

SP

24 May

Thursday 24 May 2012

Your Activist thought you’d rather look at this picture of a gay marriage than yet another picture of David Cameron and politicians. I’m right, aren’t I. Photo: Stefan Postles/Sydney Morning Herald

British Prime Minister David Cameron has climbed down and will allow MPs a free vote on gay marriage. This follows warnings from Conservative backbenchers that a “whipped” vote could cause “serious divisions” within the party. It is an attempt to avoid splitting the Tory party amid strong opposition in some quarters to equality in marriage. The prime minister’s strong backing for the proposals has fallen on deaf ears as far as his party, the Conservatives, are concerned.

Max Hirsh. Associated Press

Another one for striking off. Max Hirsh sensed something was wrong when the psychiatrist focused on his failures with sports and teenage girls, and his relationships with older men, particularly his father. He became convinced of the psychiatrist’s rationale for those questions by the fourth session, when he essentially told the openly gay Hirsh that his true sexuality was in the closet. “But you’re heterosexual,’’ Hirsh recalls the psychiatrist telling him. Hirsh insisted he was gay; the psychiatrist wasn’t buying it. “He said ‘No,’ like he had some extra information about my sexuality that I didn’t,’’ Hirsh said. ‘It was clear that he wasn’t actually, in any way, helping with my depression. I was feeling worse.’

Hirsh, 22, contends the Oregon psychiatrist was practicing “conversion therapy’’ to change his sexual orientation. His experience is the subject of an ethics complaint filed this month by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which plans to take the same action in other states as part of a national campaign to stop therapists from trying to make gay people straight. The complaint sent to the American Psychological Association and the Oregon Psychiatric Association arrived in what has become something of a watershed month for American opponents of the form of psychotherapy. California legislators advanced a bill to the state senate that would ban children younger than 18 from receiving conversion therapy. And Dr. Robert Spitzer apologized to the gay community last week for a “fatal flaw’’ in his influential 2001 study that found conversion therapy to be a successful option for some people.

SP