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
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