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

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

19 May

Saturday 19 May 2012

President Joyce Banda of Malawi. Photo: Leadership

Malawi’s President Joyce Banda wants to repeal Malawi’s laws against homosexual acts. Banda assumed the presidency in April when her predecessor died. She was giving her first state of the nation address.

It is unclear how much support Banda, who was born in 1950, would have for sweeping changes in this impoverished and conservative nation in southern Africa. Malawi faced international condemnation for the conviction and 14-year prison sentences given in 2010 to two men who were arrested after celebrating their engagement and were charged with unnatural acts and gross indecency. President Bingu wa Mutharika pardoned the couple on “humanitarian grounds only” while insisting they had “committed a crime against our culture, against our religion and against our laws.” Mutharika died in office in April. Banda, who was vice-president, is serving out his term, which ends in 2014.

Irish Times

The Irish Times has been to the Dublin International Gay Drama Festival. One of the few gay drama festivals anywhere, the Dublin is in its’ ninth year.

“Elegies for Angels, Punks & Raging Queens, for instance, a song cycle about the Aids epidemic that was first performed in 1989 and was here produced by Limerick’s Bottom Dog Theatre Company, addresses the disease as though it was a new phenomenon; confusing, unfair and all but untreatable. Through spoken-word poems and musical numbers it exhaustively outlines the many, many ways HIV might be contracted (unprotected sex, accidental needle jabs, shared needles, blood transfusion and, reviving one urban legend, malevolent people keen to spread the disease). If it didn’t feel like an after-school special with every song arriving in the key of Broadway lachrymose, director Myles Breen might have been able to give it a sense of place and to render it as a moving message or a sobering reminder freed from a time capsule.”

Oh.

” “Obviously he didn’t know whether to call me a bitch or a bastard,” reports Rachael Jones, the transgendered proprietor of a small cafe on America’s Bible Belt, which she opts to call “inclusive” rather than LGBT. A monologue written from interviews with its real-life subject, Rachael’s Café, Lucy Danser’s play for Little Fly Theatre, is certainly infused with the politics of identity, tolerance and acceptance, yet the softly sympathetic delivery of even that line, from Graham Elwell, reinforces the appearance of a performance vehicle. As Rachael describes her transition from family man and printer-ink salesman Eric, to the home-cooking enthusiast Rachael, Danser moves assuredly through a narrative of honesty, emotional betrayal and acceptance. As she addresses us, however, Rachael is typically seeking to avoid confrontation, removing her dress and donning a shirt for a parent/ teacher meeting. Danser’s project is too gentle-hearted to emphasise that quiet tragedy of retreat, but she subtly imparts the point that for transgendered equality there’s still a long way to go.”

Your Activist loves going to see a live performance in a theatre. There’s nothing else remotely like it.

Undated photo: iEyeNews

Corbin, 21, of Kingston, Jamaica says he has been a victim of discrimination and has decided to speak out openly against homophobia on the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia which was May 17th.

Corbin has been lucky to avoid violence so far, but the torture of not being able to be his true self was ‘horrendous’. “There was this time (when) my best friend and I were seeking to rent a place together since it is cheaper for two persons to share utility bills, (but) the landlady refused to take our information because she was adamant that we needed her place for more than renting as we were a homosexual couple. It is just disheartening how we jump to conclusions as a people and have such myopic views about lesbian, gays and bisexual people.”

Corbin was called ‘Sharon’ and his mother’s ‘big daughter’ while he attended co-educational school in Clarendon. “I was seen as different from boys my age, and despite my efforts on my tenth birthday in the fourth grade to ‘man up’ and appear more masculine, I was in a world by myself.”

Confused and ashamed of himself, Corbin began bashing other suspected homosexuals in an attempt to fit in with what he called ‘the accepted homophobic culture’. “I am very saddened by my subscription to this expectation, but the truth is most young people my age are guilty of this. It’s an almost innate thing for you to do as a homosexual or questioning young man.”

At University he began to fight discrimination, and began to read on issues surrounding human rights and homosexuality, asking people questions and filling the gaps. He later went on to study human rights at the post-graduate level “because I thought I needed a broad understanding around the theories of rights and processes of change”. “My aim is to ensure Jamaica is a place I can live in, that my friends, family and everyone can feel secure regardless of their sexual orientation. I also want to know that other people (heterosexuals) can feel safe and are encouraged to love lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender persons around them.”

Dr Robert L. Spitzer. Photo: Alex di Suvero/The New York Times

“Dr. Robert L. Spitzer, considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry, lay awake at 4 o’clock on a recent morning knowing he had to do the one thing that comes least naturally to him. He pushed himself up and staggered into the dark. His desk seemed impossibly far away; Dr. Spitzer, who turns 80 next week, suffers from Parkinson’s disease and has trouble walking, sitting, even holding his head upright,” writes The New York Times.

Dr. Spitzer’s fingers jerked over the keys, unreliably, as if choking on the words. And then it was done: a short letter to be published this month, in the same journal where the original study appeared. “I believe,” it concludes, “I owe the gay community an apology.”

Yes. Indeed.

Here’s the damning part of the article.

“Dr. Spitzer could not control how his study was interpreted by everyone, and he could not erase the biggest scientific flaw of them all, roundly attacked in many of the commentaries: Simply asking people whether they have changed is no evidence at all of real change. People lie, to themselves and others. They continually change their stories, to suit their needs and moods. By almost any measure, in short, the study failed the test of scientific rigor that Dr. Spitzer himself was so instrumental in enforcing for so many years. “As I read these commentaries, I knew this was a problem, a big problem, and one I couldn’t answer,” Dr. Spitzer said. “How do you know someone has really changed?”

It took him eleven years to admit his mistake. How many gay men have suffered “cures” in those eleven years, Dr. Spitzer? Do you know?

Mr Spitzer is suffering from Parkinsons. Gay Activist wishes him well. But we wish all the victims of his error far more.

Now let’s all work together to end this scourge of “gay cures” “gay therapies” and “ex-gay” for once and for all.

SP

15 May

Tuesday 15 May 2012

Tracy Thorne-Begland when he was a US Navy Pilot. Gay Influence

Virginia’s General Assembly rejected gay Tracy Thorne-Begland for a position as a judge after conservatives argued that his support for gay marriage and challenge to the military’s now-defunct “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy made him unfit for the bench. The House of Delegates voted 33 to 31, with 10 abstentions, to make Richmond prosecutor Tracy Thorne-Begland a General District Court judge in Richmond. He had needed 51 votes in the 100-member chamber to win appointment. “He holds himself out as being married,” said Del. Robert G. Marshall, who is running for U.S. Senate. Noting that gay marriage is not legal in Virginia, he said that Thorne-Begland’s “life is a contradiction to the requirement of submission to the constitution.”

Dallas Kilponen/Sydney Morning Herald

Retired High Court judge Michael Kirby told a Senate inquiry into gay marriage earlier this month that despite the heights he had reached in his career, he remained a second-class citizen because he could not marry his partner, Johan van Vloten. A reader wrote: ”It seems that all Kirby has to do is to raise his tired old hat and he gets a free kick from the Herald.” writes the SMH’s Readers Editor, Judy Prisk who goes on to look at how to achieve balance in the coverage of gay marriage.

There’s only one way to achieve balance. Have equality in marriage. Next…

Out in the Sticks publicity photograph: The Hereford Times

Organisers of the Out In The Sticks festival in Herefordshire say more needs to be done to overcome prejudice in the county. It is run by Hereford’s Courtyard Centre for the Arts and Herefordshire Rainbow Forum. Martyn Green, from the venue, hopes the festival, in its fifth year, will raise awareness and said it was “by no means exclusively for LGBT people”.

The programme of films, plays and concerts continues until Saturday. Mr Green said: “We’ve seen audiences grow and people coming out with confidence. We’ve still got some way to go – we’re not Birmingham, Brighton or London. In Herefordshire we have small pockets of those communities and it’s about giving them the confidence that there isn’t going to be prejudice.”

SP

6 May

Sunday 6 May 2012

David Cameron in happier, gayer times. Uncredited press photo

The difference a few days makes. Just hours ago the Tories and Liberal Democrats received a thrashing in local council elections, losing more than 800 seats between them, mainly to a reinvigorated Labour Party, although probably mostly as a protest vote against economic austerity and failure. Now Conservative Party leader and Prime Minister David Cameron is expected to drop his plans to legalise gay marriage after his party’s miserable showing in those elections sparked a backlash from angry Tory backbenchers. The gay marriage pledge is expected to be dropped from the forthcoming Queens’ speech.

Photo: Help Valerie

Ediage Valerie Ekwedde’s deportation to Cameroon has been temporarily halted after he refused to board a flight from London to Paris. Campaigners say his life is at risk because he is gay and should not be removed from the UK. Mr Ekwedde fears persecution in Cameroon. The UK Border Agency found “no credible evidence” he was gay. The pilot is said to have decided not to fly with him out of consideration to other passengers. Mr Ekwedde arrived in Britain last November claiming he had been persecuted in Cameroon because of his sexuality. In July 2010, the UK Supreme Court ruled that two gay men from Cameroon and Iran were entitled to refugee status in a landmark ruling. The Supreme Court heard that in Cameroon jail sentences for homosexuality ranged from six months to five years.

Some of the attendees at this year’s Equality Forum. Photo: South Florida Gay News

The Equality Forum in the US is under way and JTA proudly reports that Israel is the featured theme. The events in Philadelphia, which end today, feature an array of Israeli gay performers and activists, as well as an address by Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the United States. The forum brings together a number of gay activist groups. They have a different theme every year. This year is the twentieth consecutive annual event.

Patekile Holomisa. Photo: New Age

There is an attempt to turn the clock back in South Africa. The National House of Traditional Leaders wants to remove a clause from the Constitution which protects people on the grounds of sexual orientation. The clause, in section nine of the Constitution, reads: “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.

ANC MP Patekile Holomisa, who chairs the constitutional review committee, said sexual orientation was a difficult subject. “The last time this issue was discussed was about same-sex marriages. Most of the people in the caucus were opposed to it, but then Luthuli House and the leadership instructed us to vote for it,” he said. Holomisa heads the Congress of Traditional Leaders.

SP

2 May

Wednesday 2 May 2012

Public domain

The death of Gareth Williams, the MI6 officer who was found naked in a padlocked holdall in the bath at his London flat, was “criminally mediated”, and on the balance of probability, Williams was “unlawfully killed”, Coroner Fiona Wilcox concluded, but there was not enough evidence to deliver a formal unlawful killing verdict. She criticised the behaviour of MI6 and SO15, the Metropolitan police counter-terrorism unit, whose officer operated as a conduit between the intelligence service and detectives investigating Williams’s death. The head of the intelligence service made an unreserved apology to Williams’s family over the delay in reporting him missing and the subsequent anguish it caused. It was unlikely Williams’s death would ever be satisfactorily explained.

Hardly justice for Gareth.

Reuters

Russian police have arrested 17 gay rights activists while trying to unfurl rainbow flags at a May Day rally in St Petersburg. Police said they were to be charged with failing to co-operate with officers. “The first activists who unfurled their flags were detained. Some tried to raise posters, they were also detained,” said Yury Gavrikov, a local gay rights leader. “Two police officers would grab each person, with no warning.” More than 30,000 people took part in the city’s May Day celebrations, officials said. The rally was led by the ruling United Russia party, but also included representatives of the Communist party and nationalist groups.

UKIP

UKIP supporters burned a picture of openly gay mayoral candidate Brian Paddick in London’s Soho. The press officer for UKIP tweeted a picture of an image of Mr Paddick being burned in the capital’s historically gay district with the caption ‘@UKIPLondon2012 campaign on fire in Soho’. The press officer said that the man burning the photograph of Mr Paddick was himself gay and that the campaigners were burning his image as a Liberal Democrat politician, not as a gay man.

Scotsman

One of the best known gay bars in Scotland may be set for a new lease of life. Priscillas, in Leith Walk, Edinburgh, shut suddenly three weeks ago after five years of trading. A new potential owner is in advanced talks to take over the bar and is committed to ensuring it remains a fixture on the gay circuit.

Gary Leek, who runs the Gayzout Network Edinburgh website, said: “Priscillas was always a traditional gay venue, which we never used to have in Edinburgh. There was nothing else like it. The clientele was mixed but everyone was welcome and it had its own niche. I think it appealed because it had something for everybody and it was more down to earth. They had a good mix of cabaret and music. People in other bars tend to come and go, but people in there at 8pm would still be there at 11.”

Ken’s at Kensington. Photo: Ben Rushton BGR

Sydney, Australia’s famous gay sauna, Ken’s at Kensington, is to close due to the sale of the building on Sunday, May 20. The infamous sex-on-premises venue on Anzac Parade started life in 1973 after original owner Ken “Kandy” Johnson moved into what had been the home of another Sydney gay icon, the Purple Onion drag venue. The site was originally known as Ken’s Karate Klub, then Kensington Karate Klasses, an in-joke at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in NSW to explain why there were rubber mats all over the floors and “occasional sounds of groaning” from within.

SP

1 May

Tuesday 1 May 2012

Some Zambian Fudge: Photo: Mydish

The proposed new constitution for Zambia has been published and does not make its position on homosexuality clear, reports Zambian Watchdog. It does not out rightly rule homosexuality. It merely says on article 54 ‘that State shall recognise and protect the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society and the necessary basis of the social order. (2) A person who is eighteen years of age or older has the right to freely choose a spouse of the opposite sex and marry.’

Pink Paper

The Protection of Freedoms Act, which will enable men to wipe the records of thousands of convictions for consensual gay sex under now-repealed laws, has received Royal Assent today.

An estimated 16,000 convictions could now be eligible for removal from police records along with malicious convictions for “loitering with intent”. Men may now apply to the Secretary of State to disregard convictions under section 12 of the Sexual Offences Act 1956, the offence of buggery, under section 13 of that Act, covering gross indecency between men and under section 61 of the Offences against the Person Act 1861, which governed “the abominable Crime of Buggery, committed either with Mankind or with any Animal”, as long as those involved were over the age of 16 and the action would not now be regarded as an offence.

The proposed Burnley Gay Pride has been cancelled due to a lack of support and commitment.

SP

27 April

Friday 27 April 2012

This year’s Manchester Pride festival theme ‘Queer’d Science’ will be held in commemoration of gay computer science genius and code-breaking hero Alan Turing. The parade is on August 25. This year’s branding gives a nod to the Diamond Jubilee featuring a crowned corgi and the motto ‘Manchester Pride Rules’.

Aaaaah.

When Dominic Sheahan-Stahl was asked to be the keynote speaker at his younger brother’s high school graduation, he was deeply honoured. Mr Sheahan-Stahl, who graduated himself from the same school in 1998, prepared his speech to deliver at Sacred Heart Academy in Mount Pleasant, Michigan. But the proud former Catholic school pupil’s feelings quickly changed when the invitation to speak on May 20 was rescinded – because school bosses found out he is gay.

Should have known, really.

“When writing about domestic violence, there is often a statement to the effect that domestic violence occurs across all races, cultures, ethnicities, religions and socio-economic groups. True enough. Also stated is that sometimes females are perpetrators and sometimes men are victimized. We agree. Another fact we acknowledge in trainings and literature, but families and society keep hidden in yet another closet, is the fact that yes, domestic violence also occurs in same-sex relationships,” writes Dale Brown in the Herald News.

He continues: “we have to only reflect on the stereotypes, prejudices, discriminations, bullying, expulsions and alienation and shame that society has imposed on those identifying as LGBT to further understand the resistance of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered individuals to identify as victims and to further reach out in the hopes of informed and supportive help.”

Gay Activist’s page on domestic violence in gay relationships is one of our most frequently downloaded pages and after all these years of being an almost lone voice on the subject, it is gratifying to see other sections of the community recognising the problem.

Gay does not mean paedophile, writes Paris Lees. “One of the ugliest lies our heternormative culture spreads is the idea that gay people threaten children. Of course, gay people are capable of abuse – but so are straighties. The gay community poses no more risk to children than any other social group. Furthermore, recent research revealed that lesbian parents were actually less likely to abuse their children. So there.”

Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune

Chicago’s Gerber/Hart Library is named after Henry Gerber, who started the Society for Human Rights, believed to be the first gay rights organization in the United States, and Pearl Hart, a civil rights-era attorney who spent much of her career defending gay rights, and was founded in 1981 by historian Greg Sprague, who had earlier launched the Chicago Gay History Project.

It holds more than 14,000 volumes, 800 periodical titles and 100 archival collections, including the founding documents of Chicago LGBT institutions like the Howard Brown Health Center as well as personal diaries, artwork and newspaper clippings from the earliest days of the gay civil rights movement. The library also has some of the original signs from Carol’s Speakeasy, a legendary Chicago gay bar from the late 1970s to the ’90s, and a pair of sequined red ruby slippers signed in 1992 by members of the Chicago Gay Men’s Chorus.

There’s more on gay history in our Gay History blog, The Way We Were.

The Miami New Times have been to the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and find the event is not the huge draw it used to be. Their correspondent ‘Cultist’ was having a drink with a friend.

“I mentioned a queer film I really enjoyed called Keep the Lights On, a wonderful exploration of a relationship that came unhinged at the hands of meth addiction. My fellow imbiber heatedly agreed before adding, “And that’s great, ’cause gay films usually really suck.” I chose to not take the unintentional bait that was set up for me, but found myself half-nodding in agreement.

Gay films can really be bad. Not just run-of-the-mill bad or “got lost along the way” bad, but the kind of train wrecks where you hope there are no survivors, because life after that would probably be too impossible to bear. A former colleague of mine would describe this problem as “My girlfriend gave me a camera for Christmas, so I should make a movie” syndrome.”

Oh dear, that bad? Oh, it isn’t too bad after all.

A still from Lesbian Space Aliens Seeks Same. Photo: New York Times

“Films like Vito, Elliot Loves, and Mosquita & Mari are obvious choices for the festival, and strong ones with good buzz. Yet it’s the inclusion of films like Jobriath AD, Speechless, and Angel that are most encouraging, because they are films on subjects that don’t usually play well with traditional audiences: transgender identity, LGBT Asia, and underground music, for example. Their inclusion shows the festival is challenging Miami audiences to step up and out of their comfort zone and tackle aspects of LGBT life they’ve historically chosen to ignore at the cinema. While there are a number of films that look promising (Unfit: Ward vs. Ward, Taboo Yardies, Taking a Chance on God and 30 Years From Here among them) my “don’t miss” recommendation is the incredibly charming Codependent Lesbian Space Aliens Seeks Same, a delightful ode to 1950s science fiction films that is exactly about what the title implies, and is a sheer and simple delight.”

SP

24 April

Tuesday 24 April 2012

Photo of Dr Mike Davidson: Peter Ould

The man behind the “Post Gay” campaign which has been banned from London transport is revealed as South African born Dr Mike Davidson, 57, of Belfast. He has really driven the “Post Gay” programme with his claims of having been “treated” for homosexuality himself. Davidson admits he didn’t have a “tactile” relationship with his father. He became a Christian when he was embraced by a speaker at summer camp. At bible college he had a homosexual relationship with a visiting professor. Davidson repressed his homosexuality for years until he moved to Britain in 1999, by which time he was married and had two children. Davidson had begun a secret life surfing gay websites and at this point he sought therapy. Davidson claims this therapy steered him back to heterosexuality. He believes homosexuality is a “Normal Development Aberration” where “Normal Development” is the process of reproduction between a man and a woman.

His Core Issues Trust makes it profoundly clear that homosexuality is not considered a “disease” but describing homosexuality as a “aberration” has offended many.

You can get all sorts of things on one of these. Amazon

Meanwhile Father Martin McVeigh, the priest under investigation after accidentally displaying pornographic images of men during a school meeting, has taken an immediate temporary leave of absence. Parents and parishioners were read a statement from the Catholic Church which exonerated Fr McVeigh, but many parishioners were not happy with the statement and have refused to allow their children to take part in any ceremonies conducted by him. The flash drive seems to have disappeared.

In the Independent Fiona Shaw reveals that telling your children you are gay is harder than telling your parents.

I know him, he’s… Photo: Clapham Guardian

A festival which hoped to promote the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community during the London Olympics has been cancelled.

Pride House at Clapham Common failed to secure sponsorship and headline artists. The venture was backed by an array of celebrities, ranging from Stephen Fry to Ben Cohen, and promised a vibrant line up of entertainment across a period of 18 days. There were high hopes it would raise the profile of Clapham, while creating awareness of homophobia in sport.

A political storm has erupted following the news it has been cancelled, with opposition councillors condemning Lambeth Council for pushing the plans ahead. Tory Councillor Shirley Cosgrave, Clapham Common ward councillor said: “We had concerns about the financial viability of the event and hope that lessons will be learnt about the need for rigorous checking of applications before such events are given the go-ahead.”

LGBT campaign group Stonewall said the cancellation of the festival will come as a blow to Britain’s gay community, with Olympics organisers failing to promote sexual diversity. A spokesperson said: “Unfortunately they have done little, if anything, to promote or reach out to the LGBT community. There is one openly gay paralympian show jumper on team GB. Given the Olympic Games legacy which said they would promote diversity, they are ignoring 3.7m around the country in sport.”

Undated photo: Alamy

Gay and bisexual men are neglected and discriminated against by a health service that tends to focus solely on their sexual health.

6,900 gay and bisexual men who had used NHS healthcare services in the last year were surveyed by Stonewall who found that a third had negative experiences. Confidence in confidentiality systems and lack of opportunities for discussion were so poor that the same proportion had not even come out to their GP or other staff. The men said they were more likely to be open about their sexual orientation with their manager and work colleagues than with healthcare professionals.

3% of gay men and 5% of bisexual men had tried to kill themselves compared with 0.4% of all men. 7% of gay and bisexual men had deliberately harmed themselves, compared with just 3% of all men.

Among younger gay and bisexual men aged 16 to 24, 6% had tried to take their own life and 15% had harmed themselves. 50% of those surveyed had experienced at least one domestic violence incident from a family member or partner since the age of 16, compared with 17% of all men. (This does not surprise Your Activist. Our page on domestic violence in gay relationships is one of our most downloaded pages.)

Many patients were discriminated against by doctors and nurses. “I overheard the reception staff say to a nurse: ‘The poof is here for his appointment,’” David, 23, told Stonewall. Jack, 37, described how his doctor wrote “homosexual” in capital letters on a letter he had to take to hospital after breaking his wrist. Every time a different doctor pulled up his details on the computer, the same tag would appear.

Patients report health professionals assuming that because they were gay, they must be HIV positive, and of their partner’s rights being ignored.

Your Activist has been lucky so far with his own medical professionals, but recognises that there are areas of the health service which need improvement and further training. Gay Activist thinks the NHS as a whole suffers from an Imperious and bossy culture which is unhelpful.

SP