Gay News Roundup.

Russia: Gay pride parade brings dozens of arrests for gay propaganda and public display of homosexuality.(ABC.)

The so-called ‘gay panic’ defense in homicides. The funny thing is, the insanity or temporary insanity defense is notoriously unpopular with juries. People feel that other people should be held responsible for their actions. How many times have we heard it said?

Let’s assume I’m on the witness stand.

“Mr. Jones, why did you kill that man?”

“He called me gay and I thought he was going to kill me for being gay.” We’ll call that the ‘heterosexual panic’ defense and see how far it gets us…

“Are you gay, Mr. Jones?”

“How is that relevant?”

The Bench: “Answer the question, for it is the duty of this court to determine the truth and seek justice for all.”

***

'Victory for Marriage Rights.' Cool website for everything in lesbian news and culture.

*** 

Prosecutor on redirect: “Why did you kill his wife, Mr. Jones?”

“I thought she was a lesbian.”

“Ah-ha! Gotcha! The prosecution rests.” (He smirks at the crowd of good, clean, decent, God-fearing folks.) "How could you have possibly known by just looking at her that she was a lesbian?"

(Crowd giggles and stomps their feet.)

Yeah, I guess you got me on that one.

***

Gay rights raises questions about benefit status. Ah, yes, that whole entitlement thing, everything from military pensions, spousal benefits, company health and dental plans, it’s all on the table now. Conservatives hate entitlements such as Old Age Security and Medicare. They even hate it when the wrong sort of people can afford private insurance.

Quoting from the text:

Q: What about tax benefits for married couples with children?

A: Previously, same-sex parents who were unable to legally adopt their non-biological children were not eligible to take the dependency exemption or child-related credits, says LIpson. However, now that married same-sex couples can file jointly, Lipson says the non-biological parent can utilize these tax benefits.

***

New constitution in Hungary does not ban discrimination against gays, gay marriage is not possible. A ‘huge slap’ from country’s government and a step backwards.

Again, quoting from the text:

Similarly, Agnes Chetaille, PhD candidate in sociology at EHESS, Paris, states that “when a country is going through a hard time, its citizens become more nationalist. The promotion of pratriotism relies on the nation’s “internal enemies”.  Back in the Nineteen thirties, they blamed the Jews and now it is the homosexuals. Speeches are similar; only the perception of the enemy differs.”

(Should be taken in the context of the whole article.)

END

Gay News Roundup.

Claes Jansz Visscher

News roundup:

Homophobic killings won’t dampen NY’s gay pride. (Vice.com)

Protests in NY after murder. (Al Jazeera)

Police accused of beating, slurs.

Gay man killed in Russia in suspected hate crime. (Reuters)

Torture and beating of gay man in Russia sparks fears. (Toronto Star)

Vladmir Putin to ban gay foreign couples from adopting Russian children. (Guardian)

Masked man interrupts French Open finals to protest gay marriage. (Guardian)

‘Gay’ men sue over wedding cake. (WND.)

                                       ###

Gay news from around the world.

News and issues affecting gays around the world.

The world changes, albeit slowly.

Some places, much more slowly than others. In the west, we are comparatively lucky.

In Saudia Arabia, Sharia is the only officially recognized law. The ‘top’ is not considered gay. Social ambiguity rules the day, but there is a gay scene in this strict monarchy, as this article in The Atlantic attests. Apparently lesbianism is the norm in some social settings. The Kingdom in the closet.

Canada is funding opposition to ‘abhorrent’ anti-gay legislation in Uganda. (National Post.)

Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite. Mass protests in France over gay rights including marriage and adoption. From, ‘The Conversation.’

Gay rights cases might follow President Barack Obama on his upcoming Africa trip. (CTV News.)

Acceptance: a new word for the old school.

Joshua S. Kelly, USA Today Sports.



I had one of those fly-on-the-wall moments lately. My bug-like antenna was all a-quiver. In my work I’ll often end up grabbing a sandwich and a coffee and either sit in the truck, sit inside the eatery, or sit at a picnic table outside if the weather is good.

Jason Collins, an openly-gay basketball player, recently came out. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, in an interview appearing in The Advocate, is quoted as saying that openly gay players “would be accepted in the NFL.”

Yet the talk in that donut shop was anything but accepting. Sports is pretty easy to talk about. Issues aren’t so much. A guy in the next booth used every pejorative term for gay men that I have ever heard and some I hadn’t. There were three or four of them and a couple of them had things to say, and the others didn’t.

Only one of them mentioned something about Collins’ game, his skills as a player. That guy was probably a real basketball fan. The other guy, a loud one, was just talk, and one of his favourite subjects was no doubt gay-bashing. I mean, really.

It was fascinating, a glimpse into some people’s attitudes, and the anger was astonishing. That sense of absolute disdain for another human being. The sheer threat of it, like it somehow affected the quality of his own life.

Would an openly gay football player be accepted? What if he came out first, at training camp?

I guess we shouldn’t do hypotheticals…

But once in the league and under contract, I think he would be tolerated. Not that he wouldn’t get everything from outright hate talk, right up in your face in the line of scrimmage, but heavy-handed humour, the remark from a friend that slips out by accident, the endless questions based on ignorance…we live and die by our words.

And the words for homosexuality are words of condemnation. This is ingrained from an early age. In a sense we’re lucky: we can still hide. Black men couldn’t hide, Jews couldn’t hide, but we can hide. It is all too easy.

The top three issues for gays at this point in time are not so much about marriage rights, not so much about the right to adopt, or whether gays should be in the military.

The real issue is what we think of ourselves. Do we buy into the terms of condemnation? Do we see ourselves that way, or have we truly escaped the graffiti we read as children on a wall in some urine-smelling alley downtown or on the pavement in a local park.

Our unconscious attitudes are instilled in us from a very early age. My dad didn’t know when I was eight or ten that I would turn out to be gay. Would he have altered any of his remarks if he did know? All our dads had something to say on the subject, none of it particularly enlightened or enlightening, because they were old school. They had no other words and so no other thoughts but what had been instilled into them.

They had all the same words too.

The word we need to focus on right now is ‘acceptance.’ That’s it, just acceptance. Not for them so much as for ourselves.

Before we can change the world we must first change the way we look at it. Those answers will come from within.

The Words.

Erotica can have strong literary values. Some of the themes, which are part of the content in a book, are universal, and some are more specific to gay literature in my work.

In The Virgin and the Troll, Andre has fantasized for his whole life without doing anything about it. The themes are pretty simple. They include the need to be loved, or liked, or wanted. They include the need for friendship, and acceptance by others as well as ourselves.

One of the themes is about not judging yourself too harshly, or adopting someone else’s terms and agenda when going about labeling ourselves, something I would caution the reader to refrain from as much as humanly possible. One theme is about trust, and another is all about conquering our fears and in so doing achieving some mastery over self. The author had to be pretty comfortable in his own sexuality in order to write this sort of material. That’s not to say he didn’t learn something from it.

It led to a kind of revelation, and that is also reflected in the work. It’s in the bit about words.

One of the themes is words. That’s it, just words. And we all know the words. We learned them in the schoolyard, waiting for the bell to ring on our first day of kindergarten. It was quite a shock at the time. Other kids talked like this? We never did that at home…

Words like shit, piss, fuck and damn. Words like slut, bastard, bitch, and cocksucker.

The sort of descriptions we would prefer not to put on our resume because of the extremely negative connotations associated with them.

But is that who we are? Are we those words?

As a six year-old waiting in the schoolyard, I had no idea of who I would ultimately turn out to be as a man and a human being.

I adopted those words unthinkingly just as you did. The question is, can we drop them and let them quietly die the cold and lonely death they so richly deserve?

The story was fun to write. So much so that I wrote a series of three novellas, so the reader could follow the growth of the characters and even the writer to some extent.

Thank you for coming along on my journey.

The Virgin and the Troll. 

Throwing It Down.

Resolution. (Coming soon.)

High Stakes.

Available from Smashwords and Amazon.



Trevor was tall, with soft features, yet boyishly lean. He had sad brown eyes and a grin that lit up the place. When he got going, his one-liners were real zingers, and some nights they just couldn’t stop laughing. They’d been out a few times with a bunch of friends, but then they started going out, just the two of them.

Trevor was so scared on the phone when he called the first time. It really touched Daniel, in a man so big and confident otherwise.

So far, he was painfully shy about asking.

Daniel had his mind all set to do something about that. Trevor had kissed him when dropping him off after a movie, more than a week ago now, but then on the next date he was so shy and diffident. It was like he couldn’t do it. The first date was a wake-up call. They shook hands afterwards. Daniel really liked Trevor and Ian was off in university. He was convinced Trevor was a virgin. Sex with Ian was all right, the few times they actually did it. Ian had pursued him all through high-school, in a half-kidding, half-contemptuous manner. After they had sex a few times, he was just different. He didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to Daniel after a while, and then expected him to put out at the drop of a hat. Daniel wasn’t his first choice, not at all. Not anymore. Trevor was secretive. Something had happened.

Daniel was a free man—one who just might do it for Ian when he had no one else on the line. Any deep affection he’d had for Ian vaporized. He’d relied on Ian’s attentions in some ways. He liked Ian. In many ways, Ian was a nice guy, cute enough in his own way. Ian was better than nothing. And he was gone, bitter realization that it was.

Trevor was different. He was obviously interested, and didn’t act like he owned Daniel. Such a gentleman, too, always running around to hold the door open for him, holding hands like he loved it when they walked any distance. He couldn’t get enough of him. Trevor had an inferiority complex to beat anything he’d ever seen, unlike dear old Ian. And yet he was good-looking. He was smart, he was funny. He dressed well. He had a job and made good money. Daniel had a feeling about Trevor. Trevor would set out to change the world, and he liked that. Trevor was a hopeless romantic, and he kept calling up. What was not to like? He felt safe when he was with Trevor. That streak of protectiveness was very appealing. Trevor was afraid of messing it up, which really said something about how he felt about Daniel. For him, the stakes must seem very high. There was nothing casual about Trevor. That intensity intrigued Daniel very much.

The TV went on and Trevor headed to the kitchen. He settled onto Trevor’s sagging red couch, with swirling paisley upholstery and art deco arms that might have looked elegant in the 1930s. They had stopped at the liquor store. Trevor returned with two brimming glasses of a cheap, bubbly wine. Daniel had insisted on chipping in, and made him buy a magnum. Daniel was totally prepared, serene in his mission’s purpose and outcome.

“How was work?”

“Um, it was okay.”

“I laid around in the back yard all day. Tanning. I got a bit of colour, I guess.” Daniel was just teasing him.

“Well, good for you. Some of us have to work for a living.”

Daniel laughed. He started a summer job on Monday. Although he hadn’t been accepted at school yet, he was still hopeful.

Daniel was just softening him up a little. He wondered what was going through Trevor’s mind as the mental picture of him in a banana-style bathing suit registered on Trevor’s face with a far-off look and a flurry of blinks.

Trevor gave him a funny little grin, and his eyes dropped quickly away.

(End of excerpt.)

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/310727

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CKCQW9Y

Part, Three.

As a landscape designer and the owner of the company, I keep busy enough in the winter. But if the weather wasn’t so uncertain, we’d already be going nuts with the work, so I’m kind of in a race against time to finish the third novella in the series involving Chad and Andre.

After that, I really don’t know when I’ll be able to get back into the writing. My job requires focus, as it is creative in itself. Getting out into the field and tucking into an interlocking stone terrace or planting some interesting new trees is welcome relief after the challenges of organizing even a good crew like we have here.

Writing takes focus, and sometimes that is hard to achieve.

In this story (tentatively titled, ‘Part Three’) we reach some resolution, with perhaps Andre achieving some maturity, some mastery over his inner self, and with Chad exploring just exactly what it is that he wants and expects in a mate, a soul partner or a spouse, however we choose to view the relationship.

It’s a good question isn’t it? In the hetero world, some men look for a wallflower, and some men don’t. But in the modern marriage, it’s a kind of partnership, rather than the man taking the woman into his household like a daughter, concubine or domestic slave.

The Andre character is successful in life in a limited way. He’s always had a job, he makes the car payments and insurance. And the rent is always paid at the end of the month. His secrecy, his fear of what other people think limits him in so many ways, and he has been desperately lonely—hence desperately unhappy.

Real life is no fantasy. There will be challenges, pitfalls, and sometimes what the neighbours think matters, as they can be our best friends, or our worst enemies.

As always, there is some autobiographical content in the story. 

It really only parallels my own life experiences.

It is fiction, pure and simple, but if it is to stand the test of time, it must be about real things, real people, and real situations. A real conflict, and one anybody can understand. Not just gays and bisexuals.

Men like Andre are common enough.

How many go through life, like him before he broke loose, and live in a state of denial, or merely one of confusion? Or self-loathing? How many men self-destruct when they could not find the courage.

Plenty of ‘happily married men’ are gay. What drives them to live a lie? Is the pressure of society enough, or are they mostly worried about what their mom and dad, their brothers and sisters, their friends and co-workers think of them?

Jsut what exactly is their own opinion of themselves?

Did they buy into the labels?

Most of us already know the answer to that question. It’s not so hard to guess, is it?

The world will change. Sometimes it changes faster than we are comfortable with.

 We might be asked to give up some long cherished notions.

END

Photos: Morguefile, although they are representative of the sort of work that I do.