Gay News Roundup.



Historic ruling in India clears way forward.



Britain legalizes gay marriage, opens way for first ceremonies next summer. Queen gives royal assent.  (The Spokesman, Spokane, Washington.)

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Gay marriage headed for legal status in Washington State. Governor Chris Gregoire will sign it into law in next few days, bill takes effect June 7, 2014. (Spokesman.)

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Puerto Rico: Man pleads guilty to threatening LGBT activist. (Washington Blade.)

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Woman murdered by gay husband ‘martyred’ for her faith. Murder ignored by media for ‘political reasons’ according to Bishop. (CNS News.)

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Russia: Gay man killed in second suspected hate crime in weeks. Investigators say he was stabbed, trampled to death, then placed in his car and burned. Vladimir Putin’s conservative agenda may be partially responsible. (Reuters.) 

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Same-sex on-base marriages expected to increase following the striking down of key sections of the Defense of Marriage Act. (Marine Corps Times.)

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Lesbian brutally murdered in S. Africa. 26 year-old found dead with toilet brush in vagina. Police asking for public’s help. (City Press.)

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India’s historic gay rights ruling opens the way forward. (Time.)

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As usual, the world is an odd mix of enlightenment and barbarism. The pattern seems to be that socially-permissive states seem to be not so threatened by gay rights, whereas for example in Russia, conservative politicians will make political hay from the intolerance of their constituents.

The more insecure people are, the easier it is for them to find someone to hate. Hate leads to violence and other forms of abuse.

Gay News Roundup.

‘The future is not set in stone.’ Opposition to gay marriage rights ‘characterized’ as mostly religious. Some denominations welcome Supreme Court decision to strike down protection of marriage act, including Episcopal, Evangelical Lutherans, and both the reformed and conservative branches of Judaism. (U.W.)

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An Independent Sydney MP is proposing a private member’s bill to combat discrimination based on sexuality by private schools. New South Wales discrimination act has loopholes. (au.ews.)

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Gay pride parade in N. Ireland attracts thousands. (Belfast Telegraph.)

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The government of South Africa is ‘saddened’ by murder of lesbian. Brutal murder involved toilet brush inserted in private parts.

"Every South African has a duty to act against perpetrators of violence within the ambit of the law, violent acts such as this reinforces the existing social inequalities, based on gender and sexuality, and cannot go unchallenged." (sabc.)

In other words they raped a woman with a toilet brush.

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Street preachers ‘brutally beaten’ by ‘angry queers’ at gay pride event. Vandals targeted churches. (Fox News.)

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Transgender ex Navy SEAL shares her story. She defended life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for twenty years and was deployed thirteen times. Now she’s pursuing a little happiness of her own. (Baltimore Gay Life.)

 End

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.”

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

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.)