Passed along by Brendan (thanks!).
Sexual Orientation
A montage of homophobia.
A Republican jumps ship.
For those of you not familiar with American politics, the Republicans are much like the Conservatives here in Canada, only they're more extreme in terms of their ideology. Republicans almost universally oppose same-sex marriage, so Republican politicians like this are very rare (and very courageous):
Explaining gay rights.
Gay marriage.
Thanks for passing it along, Phillip!
The World's Worst Place To Be Gay?
Uganda has a long history of being an extremely hostile place for people who identify as anything other than heterosexual. There is an all-out war against homosexuality. I've posted about it before here, here, here and here. Yabsera passed along by this recent documentary about the situation in Uganda (thanks!):
The gay lifestyle.
A scathingly satirical article at the Huffington Post by gay Professor of Theater and Chair of the Theater and Dance department, Ursinus College:
I live the gay lifestyle, the gay lifestyle that is often mentioned by some Republican candidates for president. For those who are unfamiliar with the lifestyle, this is a typical day:
7:00 a.m. I wake up, and just as I have done every morning since puberty, I choose to be gay today. This will come as a great relief to my gay, homosexual, male lover who lies beside me. Because being gay is a choice, our relationship is a gamble day to day. Even though we have both chosen to remain gay and to be together every day for the past 16 years, we never take anything for granted. One of us just might throw in the towel one day and give up the lifestyle.
7:30 a.m. I take a gay shower and let the gay water rinse off my gay body.
8:00 a.m. I have a gay breakfast of cereal with milk, and a good, strong, gay cup of coffee. I am fortified for another day of ruining the fabric of American society.
9:00 a.m. I start my morning shift as a gay hospital volunteer. The hospital is not gay, just me. The patients are mostly normal people. But it is OK. The hospital has a rule that all volunteers must sanitize their hands before meeting with patients. This is to avoid spreading germs, but I think that hand sanitizer is also effective in stopping the transfer of my gayness to other people.
12:00 p.m. I return home, eat a gay lunch and take my gay dogs for a walk. Well, I am not sure if the dogs are actually gay. I have heard it said that homosexuality does not exist in the animal kingdom because it is not natural, so chances are that the dogs are not gay. But because they live with me and my gay, homosexual, male lover, they are perceived by others to be gay. I would feel bad about this, but the fact is that I need these dogs. They are the closest that I will ever come to having actual children, because, as everyone knows, gays should not (and cannot) have children. I push this out of my mind as I walk the dogs gaily through the neighborhood.
Read the rest of it here.
Stroke leads man to come out gay.
From the Daily Mail, passed along by Amy (thanks!):
Burly rugby player has a stroke after freak gym accident… wakes up gay and becomes a hairdresser
When 19-stone rugby player Chris Birch suffered a stroke during a freak training accident, his family feared it would be a life-changing injury.
Yet while his recovery certainly brought about a transformation, it seems to have been in a way no one could have expected.
For when he regained consciousness, the 26-year-old – who was engaged to his girlfriend – claimed he had become gay.
Mr Birch’s astonishing change saw him break up with his fiancée, ditch his job in a bank to retrain as a hairdresser and lose eight stone in weight.
He has now moved in with his 19-year-old boyfriend.
The now ex-rugby player, a flanker with his local amateur reserve side, had been attempting a back flip in front of friends on a field when he fell down a grass bank, breaking his neck and suffering the stroke. Before the stroke: Mr Birch worked in a bank and played rugby
He was taken to hospital where his fiancée and family spent days waiting anxiously at his bedside before he delivered the shocking news.
Mr Birch recalled: ‘I was gay when I woke up and I still am. It sounds strange but when I came round I immediately felt different.
‘I wasn’t interested in women any more. I was definitely gay. I had never been attracted to a man before – I’d never even had any gay friends.
‘But I didn’t care about who I was before, I had to be true to my feelings.’
Read the rest of the article here.
The sanctity of marriage.
Passed along by Amy (thanks!):
Rick Mercer on gay bullying.
This past month, James Hubley (pictured below with his dad), an out gay high school student, committed suicide after being mercilessly and persistently bullied. He is one of many such cases - it seems like there's a new case of gay teen suicide due to bullying every week.
In the States, Dan Savage, of Savage Love, started a project called It Gets Better due to the rash of gay teen suicides. I've posted about it before on the blog (here, here and here). The intention of the project is to give gay kids hope. But, as some have noted, these gay teens still need to make it through high school before things may improve. Kids can be extremely cruel.
In response to the case of James Hubley, Rick Mercer, a Canadian comedy icon and political commentator, had this to say on his show, The Mercer Report:
Prison sex.
This is Jeff Smith. He was a Democratic member of the Missouri Senate until 2009, when he pled guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice and resigned his seat. He spent a couple of eye-opening years in US federal prison, and has written extensively about his experiences. The following are some snippets from an article about prison sex published at The Recovering Politcian:
A few weeks after you get to federal prison, you go through orientation. The first thing they do is take you down into the visiting room to show you a mandatory sexual assault video featuring a 40-ish white guy warning you not to eat the Snickers bar that may be waiting on your bed when you return to your cell. (He ate his, unwittingly signaling the predator who left it for him that he was ready and willing.) All the guys in the visiting room laughed. So did I. But at 117 lbs, I reminded myself not to accept any sweets during my tenure, lest I “get my windows tinted,” in the parlance of Federal Correctional Institution, Manchester.
[...]
When it came to women, there was really no limit to inmates’ imagination. The quickest way to get into a fight was by switching the channel during a women’s softball game or track meet, events that are watched with as much whooping and hollering as homemade porn at a frat house.
[...]
Only then did he realize that I didn’t understand his slang. He explained that “gunslingers” were men who ran strings from their toes up their leg to lubed up toilet paper tubes fitted around their penises. To “gun her down” would’ve been to wire himself and go to the chow hall at mealtime, position himself at a table near her post, and toe-tap away until he…well, I won’t extend the gun metaphor any further.
[...]
And then one day, as I walked down to the bathroom late one night, I saw it. They were in bed together, snuggling and talking quietly. I saw a newbie snicker, and then a prison old-head ice-grilled him. “It ain’t none o’ yo muthafuckin bidness,” said the look, and the newbie scurried back to his cell. After that, no one said a word about it. And it remained that way every night for the next few months until I left.
Go read the whole amazing account here.
More on gay marriage.
DADT officially dead.
On Tuesday, the US military, in response to repeal legislation passed by US Congress, officially rid itself of a long-standing policy preventing openly gay men and women from serving in military. The policy was called Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Previously, if someone was outed, he/she would be given the boot. Now, men and women can serve in the military as openly gay. This is an absolutely massive victory for gay rights. This video was posted on Tuesday, and already has over 2,000,000 hits. I dare you to watch it and not get a little choked up:
New Spiderman gay?
From Mail Online (thanks for passing it along Rayka!):
Marvel Comics reveals the new Spider Man is black - and he could be gay in the future.
He started life as a white science geek living with his uncle.
But now to reflect the racial changes in America Spider Man has been given a makeover - as a half black half Latino teen.
Miles Morales has replaced Peter Parker as the face behind the famous webbed mask, Marvel Comics has revealed.
In the latest edition of the Ultimate Fallout series he pulls back the disguise and shows his face for the first time.
Fans will have to wait until the official Spider Man relaunch next month to find out how he came to be the superhero.
But another surprise could be in the pipeline after his creators said that in the future they would not rule out making him gay.
Read the rest of the article about Spiderman's future here.
Homosexuality in the wild - zebra finches.
From the BBC:
Homosexual zebra finches form long-term bond.
Same-sex pairs of monogamous birds are just as attached and faithful to each other as those paired with a member of the opposite sex.
The insight comes from a study of zebra finches - highly vocal, colourful birds that sing to their mates, a performance thought to strengthen the pair's bond.
Scientists found that same-sex pairs of finches sang to and preened each other just like heterosexual pairs.
The study is reported in the journal Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology. A displaying pair of king penguins Male king penguins have been seen to "flirt" with other males in the colony
Lead researcher Julie Elie from the University of California Berkeley said that the research showed that "relationships in animals can be more complicated than just a male and a female who meet and reproduce, even in birds".
Dr Elie and her colleagues are interested in zebra finches' behaviour. The birds establish life-long relationships and are highly social; males sing to their mates, the birds preen each other and pairs share a nest.
Read the rest of the article here.
And more on homosexuality in the wild, from a previous post: here.
Oops.
Via the SLOG:
The Sissy Boy experiment.
Finally, this story is getting mainstream airtime and the practitioners of reparative therapy are being taken to task. George Rekers is one of the pioneers of this type of extremely cruel and harmful treatment, and a former officer and scientific advisor of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH). Not at all coincidentally, he was caught going on a trip to Europe with a rent boy who provided him "sexual massages." From CNN:
Texas!
From ABC's Primetime:
It's Not Gay When It's In a Three-Way...
Another from SNL, this time a 90s-themed short featuring Andy Samberg, Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga.
Gay marriage update - good news!
In Canada, gay marriage has been legal across the entire country since 2005, making Canada the fourth country in the world to make it legal. In the States (and most other countries), the battle for gay marriage rights is still being waged. Historically, the public in the US has been strongly opposed to gay marriage, but that has slowly been changing. The latest polls show that for the first time, more people support gay marriage than oppose it. From The New York Times:
A poll from CNN this week is the latest to show a majority of Americans in favor of same-sex marriage, with 51 percent saying that marriages between gay and lesbian couples “should be recognized by the law as valid” and 47 percent opposed.
This is the fourth credible poll in the past eight months to show an outright majority of Americans in favor of gay marriage. That represents quite a lot of progress for supporters of same-sex marriage. Prior to last year, there had been just one survey — a Washington Post poll conducted in April 2009 — to show support for gay marriage as the plurality position, and none had shown it with a majority.
As we noted last August, support for gay marriage seems to have been increasing at an accelerated pace over the past couple of years. Below is an update to the graph from last year’s article, which charts the trend from all available public polls on same-sex marriage going back to 1988.
Read the rest of the article here.
On a related note, Prose Before Hos has put together "a handy graph [i.e., pie chart] for the confused," outlining the potential effects of legalizing gay marriage.
