The Guardian: We Are The 83%

Guardian online poll, so not representative of the general population, obvs - but you gotta love Guardian readers.

PS Illustrated - sadly - with a photo of some headless gay men's hands. The Guardian of all papers should know better. It's shameful - and shaming. I feel an angry email coming on...

Update: More hands-only gayers in Tuesday's Independent. 

James Murphy: Misfits

THE RECORD THAT MADE ME WANT TO BE A MISFIT

Violent Femmes, Violent Femmes (1983)
This was like a gateway drug to weird punk rock, and it immunised me against the more macho variety. I was 11 or 12 when I first heard it. My friend Arthur had a boombox and this was one of the tapes he played. For me punk rock was a bit like the B-52s – it was pretty gay and weird and broken and really misfitty. It wasn't like 300 guys with their heads shaved agreeing – that never felt punk to me, that felt like a football game. I wanted to be in a room with the weirdos, not the football thugs.

The beyond great James Murphy - the most consistently stunningly brilliant and original musician of the last decade - talks about the records that made him to The Observer. 

Obligatory PR blurb - Shut Up and Play the Hits is out on DVD and Blu-ray on 8 October. To hear a Spotify playlist go to tinyurl.com/MurphySoundtrack

PS Shut up and listen to this! (FTPA DFA YAY!!!)

Meet David Sedaris: Back Back Back!!!

New series starts tonight on Radio 4 at 7.15!
Yay!

PS He's the funniest (gay) man in the world, if you don't know. And if you don't, then more fool you.

Fagburn: How Many Gay Men Are There?

To try and settle a debate...
Here's an extract from something I wrote in November 2005. 
 
--> The equation’s quite simple: the number of gay and bisexual men living in the UK who’ve had a positive HIV test is 26,400 (HPA, 2004 figures) and the percentage of gay and bisexual men who’ve tested positive, according to the last Sigma survey, is 7.2%. This gives us a figure of 377,520 gay and bisexual men (14.3 x 26,400). As the UK adult male population is 23.4 million (2001 Census), this gives us a percentage of the adult male population who are gay or bisexual of 1.62% (“Bisexual” here basically means actively bisexual, rather than theoretical. Calculating the number of lesbians through HIV data is impossible).

Ford Hickson of Sigma thinks such a triangulation “adds up”, and calculated a similar figure himself. Although he stresses that the percentage of men who said they’d tested positive in the Sigma survey is probably an overestimate; “We think gay men with HIV are more likely than those without HIV to take part in surveys like Sigma's, partly out of altruism, but also because it’s a gay community survey and positive men are at the heart of the gay scene.” He believes the figure for gay and bisexual men living with diagnosed HIV is between 4% and 5%, with 4% meaning a higher number of 660,000 gay and bisexual men in the UK, or 2.82% of the adult male population. These figures are far less than has been conventionally thought, but come close to the findings of both the NATSAL surveys. So, could it be that we’re only 1.5%-3%, or between one in 66 or 33? Are there really only about 350,000–700,000 gay and bisexual men in the UK? It could be an underestimate, but this year’s Sigma survey will provide an opportunity to compare it with another – and arguably more precise - triangulation, as it asks how many men have entered Civil Partnerships. Ford Hickson says that results in so far appear to confirm a figure of around 2.6%.

PS Send me a message if you want a full copy.

Daily Mail: 99% Of Gay Men Don't Have Faces

One in 66 Britons is gay or bisexual - NOT one in ten, as previously thought

Only one in every 66 people say they are gay or bisexual, a nationwide survey revealed yesterday.

The numbers are in contrast with the decades-old and widely accepted 10 per cent figure for the gay population, and the 6 per cent estimate used by Whitehall when civil partnership legislation was drawn up in 2003.

The Office of National Statistics survey found that 1.5 per cent of men say they are gay, 0.7 per cent of women say they are lesbian, and 0.4 per cent of people identify themselves as bisexual...

The Daily Mail - clearly rejoicing in this news.
Not even Kinsey thought one man in ten was gay, you thick fuck.
If you think this survey tells us anything meaningful, you are clearly an even bigger thick fuck.
I came up with a pretty basic formula for calculating this - extrapolated from HIV figures - and it's (probably) somewhere between 2 and 4%.
You thick fucking fuck.

PS Great illustration - ever wonder why some gay men aren't out, when you can't even print photos showing their faces? For shame! You thick homophobic fucking fucks.

David Laws: Oh Father

Daily Mail.

Whilst I abhor David Laws' politics - and agree he got off far more lightly than us "welfare scum" would (and the Mail will probably be sensationlising this story), but maybe he hasn't talked to his dad for 15 years cause he was a homophobic bully?
Just a thought.

Rupert Everett: Dreadful. Snob.

"He's a dreadful snob, really." 

And that is all you really need to know. 
From a profile in The Guardian.

PS Vanished Years was serialised on the wireless this week, and I have to confess, I found it quite amusing. 

PPS Having a straight publication calling a gay man a "queen" in the headline, unsettles me. Am I alone in thinking this?

PPPS Rupert is one of those "queens" the broadsheets adore - "Ooh, he's bitchy, but clever with it!" (See also John Waters, Neil Tennant and the late Gore Vidal) - so he's probably everywhere this weekend. Forgive me if I don't catalogue them all.

Update: Claims in the Sunday Telegraph he's got "death threats" about his disparaging of gay parenting. You may note Dame Rupert hasn't contacted the police. Silly old drama queen.

Peter Ackroyd: Disappointed

"When I was a child I wanted to be Pope. My greatest disappointment is missing out on that. I also wanted to be a tap dancer but I never fulfilled that ambition either. I used to tap dance, but I can’t now."

Q&A with Peter Ackroyd in FT Weekend - the FT proper has next to no coverage of The Gays, it's kinda outside their remit, but FT Weekend seems positively obsessed - and in a good way. 

David Walliams: Notes On Camp

“Once you become well known and a certain national daily newspaper has a gay-o-meter — naming no names! — people have a sense of what you’ve been up to.
“Not necessarily what you’re thinking or feeling, but actually your childhood, your early life, your passage to success is generally something that they're going to know nothing about. I wanted to concentrate on that period.
“I know there is fascination with me because I'm camp, yet over the years I’ve been connected to some very beautiful women.
“I’ve married a supermodel yet there I am on Britain’s Got Talent with Simon Cowell, camping it up.”
And referring to experiences as a teen he added: “I guess I’m just very honest about my sexuality.
“I had gay experiences as a child and remember being very confused about that.”
He continued: “I think there will still be people who will want it out of me, until the day I die.
“But I’m glad I talked honestly about my childhood sexual awakening because I think there’s plenty of other people out there who will be reading it and say, ‘That’s quite normal, that happened to me. It confused me too.’
“I’ve always been effeminate, and I think people confuse effeminacy with homosexuality, like they go hand-in-hand.
“But there are plenty of effeminate people who are straight, and plenty of butch people who are gay.
“I’ve always been camp, I’ve always been drawn to playing Wonder Woman in the school playground. I’m not worried about it, it just seems other people are."

David Walliams in The Sun.
His autobiography, Camp David, has a brilliant title, which may be baffling to anyone under 40 who doesn't know about the Camp David Middle East peace talks (Camp David's also, hilariously, in Maryland).

PS Walliam's first book - for children - The Boy In The Dress is beautiful, go read it.

Bertrand Russell: On Silliness

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a wide-spread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

Bertrand Russell.

Believe everything you read in the papers, it's all true.
Same with the tellybox.
And anything you see on the internets.
If someone says something happened, it happened.
So don't question anything, ever.
Yay!

PS Bertie, one of the 20th Century's greatest men and leading anti-theists, had as his motto the following quote from Exodus; ''Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil." 
Humbly, I hope that could be Fagburn's motto, too.  
Good day. 

Stonewall Awards: Satire Dies Again

Tom Lehrer once famously said satire died when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Today satire may be rolling in its grave after Gay Star News was shortlisted for 'Best Publication' in the Stonewall awards.
I know, basically, every gay publication gets routinely shortlisted, to keep them sweet - the only recent exception being Pink News - cause publisher Ben Cohen has dared to be critical of Stonewall, but this is a joke.
Let's have a quick check of Gay Star News' high journalistic standards.
Let's have a look - just by way of example - at their most recent news story... 

An anti-gay activist group has demanded Russia’s prosecutor general to take action against a milk brand that they allege promotes homosexuality.
Activists also stated that they will picked shops selling milk produced by PepsiCo Inc's Russian subsidiary because they believe that a rainbow on the packaging violates St. Petersburg’s law banning 'homosexual propaganda'.
Reuters reported that the milk product branded, Vesyoly Molochnik, translated as Gay Milkman (although in Russian the word vesyoly does not suggest homosexuality) was deemed to violate the law as it features a rainbow, which the group says is the international symbol for the LGBT movement...

Nice of you to acknowledge Reuters, cause this story is basically cut-and-pasted from this Reuters story below.
Though you could have pointed out the story is a load of inconsequential balls from some self-publicist, but - hey - the gay media should just reprint crap from the straight media, unchallenged, unchecked, unquestioned, cause then it's doing its job, right.  

An anti-gay activist group said it will picket shops selling milk produced by PepsiCo Inc's Russian subsidiary because they believe that a rainbow on the packaging violates a local law banning homosexual "propaganda".
The milk brand is called Vesyoly Molochnik, which translates as Gay Milkman, though in Russian the word vesyoly does not suggest homosexuality. The group said that it was objecting to the rainbow, which it saw as the international symbol for the gay movement...

This is quite general to GSN.
As Roland Barthes would say, interesting parlour game, try Googling any of their "news stories" on Google News and playing spot the difference to all the stuff they've nicked off the straight media - again without questioning its veracity or bias. 
But that, my friends, is clearly award-winning "gay journalism".
Yay!

One Direction: Louis, Louis

The One Direction boys headed to Alan Carr's chat show set yesterday to pre-record an interview with the Chatty Man. They talked about kissing, they talked about they talked about string theory** and they talked about the homosexuality rumours that have been thrown at Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson ever since the dawn of day the term Larry Stylinson was coined.
Alan put on his serious face for a moment, and questioned Louis quite intently about why he appears to get so upset about the rumours.
“I just think it’s really degrading towards her," Louis said - presumably talking about his girlfriend, Eleanor Calder, and not just getting confused about his bandmate's gender...

The Mirror's ever hilarious 3am Girls. 
Can't think how those rumours got started, girl.

PS Yup, it's another slow news day. Hey, don't kill the messenger.

The Independent: The Smith?

The Independent.

If you're going to write a snitty, nitpicking book review probably best to spell the band's name right.

PS The Independent's new Independent Voices online section is beyond tragic. This paper really has gone dog-wise.

PPS Nothing to comment on today thus far, but I'm sure someone will annoy me sooner or later. If not I'll just post some photos of Tom Daley. Bye!

EastEnders: New Gay Bloke

This is the new gay homosexual gay character in EastEnders, Danny Pennant, played by Gary Lucas.
Who's not gay in real life, right!
Phew!
He's interviewed in The Sun, who asked the question on everyone's mind; "What was it like having to kiss a bloke?"
It was "different", we learn.
I guess he's going to be another one of those "straight-acting" gayers they specialise in - and not a bloomin' nancyboy or nuffink.  
We also get the following plot summary [SPOILER ALERT!]

Gary — who has starred in Hollyoaks and The Bill — makes his Walford entrance tomorrow when banker Danny leads a gang of pals into The Argee Bhajee.
After they’ve gone, desperate Syed faces the unwelcome arrival of a debt collector, who demands £9,000 within ten days.
And when Danny returns to get his scarf at just the right moment, his flirty charm seduces Syed into admitting his money worries to him.
But the pair’s chemistry — and their illicit kiss — will throw the spanner in the works for Syed’s engagement to Christian Clarke, played by John Partridge.

And that - in a nutshell - is why I don't have a TV.

Iran: New Outrage!

President Ahmadinejad of Iran has sparked outrage across the globe after becoming the first politician in recorded history to say something dumb and vaguely offensive about The Gays.
Commented blogger GayZionistLoon; "You'd never hear a politician in the US or UK or Israel saying something homophobic - how does this sleazeball get away with it?"
Mr Ahmadinejad said he didn't like The Gays much and they probably weren't "born that way" - drawing fury from Lady Gaga fans worldwide.
Even though he was speaking through a translator in Farsi - and most of his more "outrageous" comments in the past have been shown to be based on deliberate mistranslations - the gay media have been almost universal in their vaguely racist and power-serving condemnation. 
"This man is worse than Hitler," commented leading comedy gay hysteric, Patrick Smugtwit."In Iran every single gay man in the country has been hanged in what can only be called 'genocide'. I read this on the internets."
The president's comments - made in an interview with Piers Moron on CNN - have led to renewed calls to bomb Iran into the Stone Age, straight after we bomb Paris Hilton and the Vatican, presumably.

Andy Warhol: Four Queens

Andy Warhol, who famously said he wanted to be as famous as the Queen, has had four of his celebrated portraits of Elizabeth II acquired by the Royal Collection.
Fittingly, as the Queen marked her 60th year on the throne this year, the works — created in 1985 and part of a series called Reigning Queens — are sprinkled with diamond dust.
They will be displayed for the first time in the exhibition The Queen: Portraits Of A Monarch from November 23, which is being staged at Windsor Castle... 

The Times.

Nick Grimshaw: #MissMoyles

When I first saw this I thought "Miss Moyles" was a new nickname for Grimmy.
Can we make it so?

PS Guests on his first show included Harry Styles, Justin Bieber and Matt Smith... Hellew!
Were Tom Daley and Lady Gaga busy?

PPS Thought I'd post this photo below as I found it arousing amusing.

Daily Mail: We Have Banned Your Faces

France is set to ban the words 'mother' and 'father' from all official documents under controversial plans to legalise gay marriage

The Daily Mail.
Not actually really strictly true, obvs.
Illustrated with the above.
Can we end the ban on publishing photos of gay couples' faces?
Cake toppers, hands, backs of their heads - this is what The Shameful Gays look like.

Gay Star News: Meaningless Award Winner

The worst gay news website in the world - Gay Star News - thanks its billions of followers after Tris Reid-Smith wins an award in the totally made-up and meaningless "National Diversity Awards".
Wow - that's prestigious.
(I think you basically get an award if you're rich and stupid enough to book a table at £100 a head - I guess Tris's daddy paid). 
See some people thrill at the magical talents of Tristram on this video - without pointing out they're slave-labour interns, or - oops - his boyfriend.
It can only be onwards and upwards for this now "award-winning" drivel machine.

Lib Dem Conference: Live At The Witch Trials

My colleague Nicholas Watt speaks shortly after, making a passing and innocuous reference to "gay marriage"; he is immediately "corrected" by several voices - he should have said "equal marriage", it seems.

Andrew Sparrow live blogging from the Lib Dem conference for The Guardian. 
God, some people are boring and sanctimonious.
Is anyone so politically delusional they think policing the use of words will make a difference here?
You see this drivel on Twitter a lot, usually from the usual wet liberal suspects.
I'm a gay man, I write a gay blog, I go to gay bars, I read the gay press - I have no problem with anyone calling it "gay marriage".
It doesn't matter.

Dexys: Incapable Of Love

Not spotted much in the papers worthy of comment yet, so here's Dexys doing my current feem toon.

PS Kevin keeps doing hilarious subtle lyric changes live, so here we get; "Have you got a view on open relationships? I don't mean that in a bisexual way."
And as ever there's a brilliant sense of theatricality/camp sadly missing from much popular music.
Oh, Kevin, my love, you genius, the stories I could tell...

x

James Bond: Ah, Mr Moneypenny...

One of James Bond’s biggest fans, David Walliams, revealed a conversation he had with producer Barbara Broccoli when guesting on the One Show yesterday:
“I did ask her to be Moneypenny. I said: if M is a woman, why can’t Moneypenny be a man, and have a crush on James Bond? But she just laughed, and not in a good way.”

Via Unreality TV.
Shame. Sounds so very different to Sebastian Love in Little Britain... 

The Independent On Sunday: More Drivel About "Gays" (This Time With Added Drugs)

The Independent On Sunday have AN EXPOSE!
'Drug Use "Seven Times Higher" Amongst Gays'.
Unfortunately, like most of the stuff the Independent runs on "Gays" [sic], it's stupid and patronising rubbish.
The "seven times" figure is nebulous - here's the report - but it became a media canard.
And anyway, there is no way anyone can do a reliable survey on gay - or straight - drug use, so nothing can be extrapolated from this by any rational person.
If you do a self-selecting online survey, or ask people at Pride events, people who don't do drugs will probably ignore it, people who take them will happily fill it in.
How can you compare its findings to an official crime survey, across all age groups, where people might - just possibly - be tempted to play down their drug use?
Apples/oranges. 
Gay men certainly take more drugs than their straight peers, but this is rarely "problematic" or "drug abuse".
Though admittedly, some groups looking for more Lottery funding may want to make out it's a big problem. 
It's usually just fun - like sticking a cock in your gob - and it's insane and reprehensible to try and stigmatise it.
You're infinitely more likely to die in a car accident going to a gay club, than you are of dying of drugs inside one.
Should we start telling gay men not to get in cars? 
And the survey was published over a month ago, so why does The Independent think this is news?
My guess is this crapola was written by some silly posh intern whose knowledge of gay men, drugs and the gay scene could be summarised as "Fuck all."
As I keep saying, The Independent's gay news coverage is the most dreadful and erratic drivel.
But this was particularly shameful and stupid, stupid, stupid!

Thought For The Day: Paul O'Grady On The 80s

“It was like something out of a ­horror movie.
“It was a really bad time. When I wasn’t in a hospital comforting a friend in their final hours, I’d be at another friend’s funeral or consoling someone’s parents, who didn’t even know their son was gay, let alone dying.
“By the time Aids had done its worst, there were only three of our original group of friends left.”

Paul O'Grady talking to the Sunday Mirror. 
Lovely chap, back on the tellybox in For The Love Of Dogs on Monday.
He also has his third volume of memoirs, which cover the Lily Savage years, Still Standing, published next month.
His books are great - At My Mother's Knee... was notoriously the first book in living memory to get unqualified praise from Private Eye's normally caustic reviewer.

David Laws: Coming Out

He seems much more at ease with himself than when he was last a minister. But it must have been traumatic to feel obliged to disclose that he was in a Tory coalition. 
“It was a multiple car crash in a political sense and personal sense. Although funnily enough the last year has been the happiest year of my life. I could be honest about who I was.”
In some ways, he wishes that he had come out as more right-wing than most Tories earlier. “It does simplify life enormously not having secrets. It would have made my life a lot easier and happier — and that of those close to me. But these things are constrained by circumstances. When you have protected your privacy and presented yourself as one particular individual then there never seems to be the perfect time to change that until you are forced to.” 

David Laws, glowingly profiled in The Times.
Some words may have been changed...

Daily Mail: Look At These Evil Men!!!

Who are the real bigots? Christian couple reveal how they have suffered a two-year campaign of death threats and abuse for refusing to let two gay men share a room in their B&B

They never made it past the kitchen or the extract from Jeremiah (chapter 16, verse 19) stuck firmly to the fridge.
Because Susanne, 56, and Mike 58, are devout Christians and only allow married heterosexual couples to book into their double rooms. And Michael Black and John Morgan, who hail from Cambridgeshire and have been together for nearly ten years, are gay.
‘I’d had a booking from a Mr Black for the Zurich room — a nice big double with an en-suite,’ explains Susanne. ‘And, naturally, I assumed it was for Mr and Mrs Black. But as I helped them manoeuvre their car into the drive, I realised they were two men and I thought: “Oh dear, this isn’t a situation I can go along with..."
So after inviting them into the kitchen (‘It felt rude to have this conversation outside’), and despite her website promising ‘a very warm welcome to all visitors’, Susanne, a former airhostess and mother of four, told them politely and firmly that she was very sorry but they’d have to leave.
‘I said that because of my convictions, I could not go along with two men in the big double bed and I refunded their £30 deposit...’
‘We are not homophobic,’ says Mike, who traded 30 years as a financial director in the City to become leader of a local non-denominational church in Marlow eight years ago.
‘We would happily have all our rooms filled with gay folk on a single occupancy basis. But not sharing a double bed because, for us, sex when you’re unmarried is a sin before God.’

Daily Mail.
Here's the hotel's website - please make mischief.
I really doubt they ever got any death threats - the police could have traced them in minutes, but - you know - wah wah wah, poor you! *makessadface*
Stupid Christian bigots. 

Deborah Orr: Against Orientalism

Many of the Islamic values the west finds so reprehensible were our own settled values too, until embarrassingly recently. Islamic homophobia? Not acceptable.
Yet gay people in Britain only achieved the same rights to legal sex as heterosexuals in 2001. Islamic inequality in its treatment of men and women? Don't start me. Yet I remember a time when two women walking into a pub together was like two pheasants wandering on to a shooting range.
Barbarous Islamic punishment? We hanged our last murderers in 1964. Some Islamist groups' yearnings for world domination? Britain parcelled out the land of another people like it was the family allotment, as recently as 1948...

A brilliant piece by Deborah Orr in The Guardian. 
Thank you - shame it's so rare to read such sense.

Thought For The Day: Rev Peter Ould

 
Church of England priest Peter Ould believes men can live together as partners and have holy and fulfilled lives, as long as those lives are celibate.
He argues that sexual desire can be suppressed for both homosexuals and unmarried heterosexuals and that God will replace those wants with something else.
Mr Ould is married with children and calls this stage of his life "post gay". Although he never had sex with a man or conversion therapy, in his 20s he was provided with pastoral support for his attractions to men.
"A holy life means abstaining from sexual relations until one is married to someone of the opposite sex," he told BBC Religion....

BBC News online. 
Strange that anyone from the church can spout this moralising high-ground twittery, when the Catholic church and the Church of England are the world's biggest paedophile rings.

PS The BBC story centres on the story of a gay man who claims to have spent $30,000 on conversion therapy - which failed. Sorry, but he sounds like a fruitloop and fantasist.

Leonard Cohen: Unhappy Birthday

x

Pride London: Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens

What went wrong with the funding of World Pride London and what lessons are there for the Mayor’s future support of large scale community events?

World Pride London should have been an international celebration of the gay, lesbian and transgender community in the capital.
However, despite the free use of Trafalgar Square and up to £100,000 of funding from the Mayor from London, just 10 days before the event Pride organisers announced they were short of cash.
This led to the significant scaling back of the parade and planned entertainment.  As a result participation in the procession was estimated at between 5,000 and 25,000 rather than attendances of 800,000 recorded in previous years.
Our Greater London Authority Oversight Committee is conducting a review of the funding of World Pride London and the impact scaling back the event has had.
As part of its investigation, the Committee will look at:

• How and why the decision was taken to scale back the event;
• The role of the Mayor in supporting World Pride London;
• The role of London and Partners in supporting Pride and the impact on London’s reputation of its scaling-back; and
• The Mayor’s objectives for future support for London Pride and what lessons can be learnt for any other large-scale community events.

If you or your organisation would like to contribute views or information to this review please contact Richard Derecki at richard.derecki@london.gov.uk by 1 November at the latest.

GLA website.
If you contact Richard Derecki you may want to point out Pride London has been hijacked for the last 15 years by posh idiots who fed the media a laughable lie that a million people had attended the last ones.
And they held a parade/march - basically again, hijacked - by way of example, an advert for a crap corporate firm so crap they can order their slave-wage staff to dress up as giant factory-fed chickens and humiliate themselves on a Saturday - with a bunch of crap PAs on a small stage after.
And this would cost how much exactly?
Any guesses where all the money went?

Gok Wan: Baggage

I'm really looking forward to not watching this tonight.

Update: General consensus seems to be it was "atrocious".
Oh Gok, don't let them turn you into a caricature...

Dexys: I Saw The Best Gig Of My Generation...

Brighton Dome last night.
Wow!
I was left devastated and cried, then cried all the way home.
Never seen any concert so great in my life.
Isn't it awful when one of your favourite bands reforms and exceeds all your expectations?
The One Day I'm Going To Soar part was magnificent - though I had to move cause it was seated and some posh buffoons next to me kept talking cause they were waiting for Come On Eileen. 
But the second half was just transcendental.
One thing that struck me - cause I never saw them back in the day - but reviews often used to complain about Kevin's theatricality (like the revived police man questioning thing), meaning it was too "campy" - but this is one of the things that made it for me.
Like the way Kevin prowled around all over the stage and its curtains.
And like how he duetted with Madeleine on a video screen at first like she wasn't there, then she suddenly appears, and then turns up at the end and does this Swan Lake fall.
Astonishing.
Bestest gig ever!
Thank you, Kevin et al.

PS Photo from the lovely and talented NigeyB.

The Independent: Breaking - Doctor Offers Advice

A senior member of the Royal College of General Practitioners was under investigation last night after advising medical students to act less “overtly gay” to ensure they passed exams.
The RCGP launched the inquiry after it emerged that Dr Una Coales had written a guide setting out ways in which minority candidates can “neutralise bias” from the college's examiners.
Dr Coales, a member of the college's council who came third in this year's ballot for presidency, suggested gay students speak in deeper voices and alter their body language to increase their chance of success in the RCGP's Clinical Skills Assessment.
In one passage of the guide, Dr Una Coales's MRCGP CSA Book, she writes: “One candidate was facing a third sitting and yet no one had told him that his mannerisms, gait and speech were too overtly gay, and that he was sitting an exam administered by a right-wing conservative Royal College...

The Independent.
Sounds like okay advice, though a bit simplistic - be wary of homophobes and bigots.
Please note this article was written by grinning fool Patrick "Don't forget to print a photo of me!" Strudwick, Britain's leading hysterical gay loon. 

The River And The Mountain: Dumb

A petition expressing outrage over the detention in Uganda of the British theatre producer David Cecil for staging a play about homosexuality has been signed by more than 1,000 leading figures in the entertainment world including Mike Leigh, Stephen Fry, Sandi Tokswig and Simon Callow.
Other signatories include the authors David Edgar, Caryl Churchill and Hanif Kureishi, the actors Michael Sheen, Michael Pennington, Janet Suzman and Harriet Walter, and the former culture secretary James Purnell.
The letter, circulated by Index on Censorship and David Lan, artistic director of the Young Vic, will be delivered to the Ugandan high commission in London...

The Guardian. 

This is clearly dumb and wrong and I hope they free him, but I can't see what David Cecil hoped to achieve by staging this play.
Did he - a white European - consult any Ugandan campaigners, and check whether this with might by seen as a Western provocation which could actually make things worse for gay men in Uganda, and look like an act of cultural imperialism?
I guess he must have. 
Does anyone know?

PS Britain hardly has a great record on theatre censorship.

Paris Hilton: Stupid Rich Person Says Something Stupid Shock!

'Noted dimwitted bigot and frequent star of recordings she didn't know she was starring in Paris Hilton has said something stupid again. Imagine. And it was during New York Fashion Week. Double imagine.
'A cab driver recorded a conversation she and a friend were having about the gay hook-up app Grindr. After he explained the mechanics of it, Paris said:

Ewww. Eww. To get fucked? Gay guys are the horniest people in the world. They're disgusting. Dude, most of them probably have AIDS...I would be so scared if I was a gay guy. You'll like, die of AIDS.

Radar has the audio.

'This is an example of an idiot saying something idiotic...'

Great piece on Gawker who get it - and on why this stupid rich girl doesn't.
Also pours scorn on her publicist's equally dumb-dumb explanation... 

Paris Hilton's comments were to express that it is dangerous for anyone to have unprotected sex that could lead to a life threatening disease. The conversation became heated, after a close gayfriend told her in a cab ride, a story about a gay man who has AIDS and is knowingly having unprotected sex. He also discussed a website that encourages random sex by gay men with strangers. As she was being shown the website her comments were in reference to those people promoting themselves on the site. The cab driver who recorded this, only provided a portion of the conversation. It was not her intent to make any derogatory comments about all gays. Paris Hilton is a huge supporter of the gay community and would never purposefully make any negative statements about anyone's sexual orientation.

I'm sure she does Love The Gays, that doesn't stop her, or excuse her, from being rich and stupid. 
Oh Amerikkka, how you need another revolution!

Ian Brady: Gay Martyr - The Movie

Ian Brady has been incarcerated in a British jail for almost 50 years.
Why?
Just because he is gay!
He expressed his love to his male lovers, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett and Edward Evans, by raping them, then killing them.
Is that a crime?
Do we live in Iran???
Anyway I am crowdsourcing to try and get gay people who are even more stupid than me to give me loads of money to make a stupid film.
Then I'll make one about those Iranian men who raped a kid - because I care. 
I may be stupid, prone to sentimentality and hysteria, and not check facts, but I care.
I really, really care.

PS Maybe some people, NGOs, and charities have a vested commercial interest in making homophobia in other countries seem far worse than it is.
Even knowingly lying about peoples' deaths.
And rapes.
Classy.
You might also want to think about how racism, neo-Imperialism and Orientalism factor in this. 
Just a thought.

Tom Daley: No Charge

“On 30 July 2012 Daniel Thomas, a semi-professional footballer, posted a homophobic message on the social networking site, Twitter. This related to the Olympic divers Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield. This became available to his “followers”. Someone else distributed it more widely and it made its way into some media outlets. Mr Thomas was arrested and interviewed. The matter was then referred to CPS Wales to consider whether Mr Thomas should be charged with a criminal offence...
"This was, in essence, a one-off offensive Twitter message, intended for family and friends, which made its way into the public domain. It was not intended to reach Mr Daley or Mr Waterfield, it was not part of a campaign, it was not intended to incite others and Mr Thomas removed it reasonably swiftly and has expressed remorse. Against that background, the Chief Crown Prosecutor for Wales, Jim Brisbane, has concluded that on a full analysis of the context and circumstances in which this single message was sent, it was not so grossly offensive that criminal charges need to be brought..."

Keir Starmer QC, the Director of Public Prosecutions.
Full statement on the CPS website.
Daniel Thomas had tweeted; "If there is any consolation for finishing fourth at least Daley and Waterfield can go bum each other #teamHIV"
Thomas - who is clearly as thick as he is homophobic - had claimed someone else had sent the message after his phone was left unattended.
Some gay media went big on this story - mainly I guess as they could put "Tom Daley" and "gay" in a sentence without fearing a libel case (though note, Tom asked that there be no prosecution).

 can go bum each other in the shower #tera"If there is any consolation for finishing fourth at least Daley and Waterfield can go and bum each other #teamHIV."

Read the full story on Sports Mole at: http://www.sportsmole.co.uk/diving/team-gb/olympics/news/homophobic-abuse-towards-daley-was-prank_37422.html

"If there is any consolation for finishing fourth at least Daley and Waterfield can go and bum each other #teamHIV."

Read the full story on Sports Mole at: http://www.sportsmole.co.uk/diving/team-gb/olympics/news/homophobic-abuse-towards-daley-was-prank_37422.html

"If there is any consolation for finishing fourth at least Daley and Waterfield can go and bum each other #teamHIV."

Read the full story on Sports Mole at: http://www.sportsmole.co.uk/diving/team-gb/olympics/news/homophobic-abuse-towards-daley-was-prank_37422.html

Nick Clegg: I'm Sorry (Autotune Remix)

It's even more funny how some people believed him when he "pledged" to legalise gay marriage. 

Pink Paper: Another One Bites The Dust

After 25 years of bringing news to the UK LGBT community, it is with sadness we announce today that it is no longer practical to continue to update Pink Paper’s daily website.

Media director Kim Watson of Pink Paper publishers MPL commented: “With a hardening economy, diminished job advertising and increasing global online news services covering similar stories, it has become harder to justify continuance of this award-winning website as part of our publishing portfolio."

Ha ha. 

Goodbye drivel machine.
This is technically the third time the Pink Paper has closed - it happened twice under the editorship of Tris Reid-Smith, something of a record in the publishing world, I think.
Well done, Tristram! 
The following editor, Peter Lloyd, managed to make it even worse - a spectacular feat.  
Shame, as it was a publication that began with good and radical intentions, in the dark days of Section 28, and used to have some great staff. 

Makes you wonder who'll be next - tick tick tick...

PS It was all written by interns for the last few months so I can't see what the costs were. Still, a sad day for slave labour, nonetheless...

George Michael: When Photoshop Goes Wrong!

And that's exactly what she looks like now...

The Independent: You Need Hands

The Independent - which regular viewers will know has the most piss-poor coverage of gay issues of any broadsheet - has started a "campaign" for equal marriage!
Oh hurrah!
And new Equalities Minister Maria Miller has finally come out for equality.
Clicktivists can even sign a petition. 
Wow!
Funny how they've just realised they were alienating gay readers with only publishing some intermittent irrelevant patronising schlock about The Gays.
How can this be?
Who told them?
Anyway, behold a tidal wave of patronising sentimental vomit while they try to redress the balance. 
Gay marriage YAY!
I think The Independent would make a more significant contribution to gay liberation, if they didn't think we are all so ashamed that they can only print photos of our hands.
Or cake toppers.
Just a thought.

The Sun: Don't Be Gay

I think this is The Sun trying to be nice and "modern", but they seem to have fucked up rather horrifically - as per.

The Onion: Newborn Loses Faith In Humanity

Peter Tatchell Foundation: Founded On Lies

Ad running on various UK gay websites. 

There is not a country in the world where people are executed "just for being gay".
If they do, they are clearly making a very bad job of it. 
I don't want anyone to be executed, but anyone who's looked into cases in, say Iran, has noticed they were actually accused of child rape.
Can we stop this sentimental hysterical Orientalist crapola and address what's really going on in the world?

Update: In reply to an email...
"Of course death and violence is a reality for many LGBT around the world, I just think it's offensive, silly and unhelpful to say there is a systematic state-sanctioned murder campaign in any country.

"What exists in law is not always acted out, which is why (for example and as far as I know), no-one was prosecuted for mere bummery in Scotland between 1967 and 1981, when it was finally legalised.

"Sorry, if I come across as a sourpuss sometimes. I do - genuinely - appreciate being pulled up on it."

Sigur Rós: Seraph

John Cameron Mitchell did it.

Benghazi: Next Stop Woo-Woo Land

Sometimes it's only these little reminders that right-wing people are even madder than me that gives me the strength to carry on.
I normally ignore junk like this, but this is full-on tinfoil hat woo-woo comedy gold!
Enjoy!

Online Media: Pink Press Threat

Just had a look at some "leading" gay news websites - mentioning no names - to see what I may have missed today.
Holy crap!
What a tidal wave of drivel.
Days old "news", advertorial, unchecked unquestioned stories lifted straight from the straight press, racist/Orientalist bigotry, right wing/reactionary crap...
I could fill a page or three just listing each mistake they made today, but guess you must be bored enough already. 
I have much respect for what various print magazines - Attitude, GScene, GT, QX, particularly - are trying to do, but why do people not implode at these online idiotic guff machines?

PS Should add I was sad to see Stephen Gray leave Pink News. Also one of the good guys.

Kitchens Of Distinction: Still Prized

Hi,

Sorry, not been well today, and consumed by guilt about letting someone I love down.
But in happier news, Kitchens Of Distinction have reformed!
More here.

Thought For The Day: Rupert Everett

When you’re young, you don’t care. I was busy constructing my identity — I didn’t give a damn about what anybody else felt. 
Looking back, I wish I’d not said tons of things. A lot of what I thought about life was just wrong! But it’s too late to worry about that now. Families are like desert islands, aren’t they? You’re all stuck there together, so you might as well get on. There’s no point in regrets. 
 [My mother] has met my boyfriend, but I’d imagine she still wishes I had a wife and kids. She thinks children need a father and a mother and I agree with her. I can’t think of anything worse than being brought up by two gay dads. 
Some people might not agree with that. Fine! That’s just my opinion. I’m not speaking on behalf of the gay community. In fact, I don’t feel like I’m part of any “community”. The only community I belong to is humanity and we’ve got too many children on the planet, so it’s good not to have more. 
The curious thing is that, as I’ve grown older, I find myself agreeing with my mother on lots of things. I look around at this new world we’ve created and I find it scary. We all share our problems on TV. We shed tears on X Factor. My mother would be far more stoic. After we lost my father, she just said: “This is how it is. Let’s get on with it”. She was right... 

The Sunday Times.

His mum said; "In the past, I have said that I wish Rupert was straight and, I probably still feel that. I’d like him to have a pretty wife. I’d like him to have children. He’s so good with children. He’d make a wonderful father. But I also think a child needs a mummy and a daddy. I’ve told him that and he takes it very well. He doesn’t get angry with me. He just smiles."

Aren't posh people odd?

PS A companion piece in The Sunday Times says; 'The actor Rupert Everett will upset fellow homosexuals [sic] with his views on parenting - WHEN Rupert Everett, the actor, came out of the closet more than 20 years ago he was heralded as a champion of gay rights.'
It's debatable when he came out, but no-one has ever thought Rupert was "a champion of gay rights."

On Success/Happiness/Optimism: Apropos Of Nothing/Something/Everything

"I don't give a toss if people say I haven't fulfilled my promise. I think my values are right but I don't want to impose them on other people. I've been lucky enough to be born in a democratic country where I can say what I like, with parents who were decent, intelligent people, where I'm reasonably well off, and where I've met a lot of interesting people and been to some interesting places. How much luckier can you get?
"Life is a matter of passing the time enjoyably. There may be other things in life, but I've been too busy passing my time enjoyably to think very deeply about them." 

Peter Cook.

"What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do."

Bob Dylan. 

"I believe the key to happiness is: someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to."

Elvis.

"Whether a person feels positive or not is kind of a comment on their personality and of no great interest. You can find positive signs or you can find negative signs. How you evaluate them depends on something that happened in your life recently or something like that. There's no objective way to do it. The important thing is you try to commit yourself to making the positive signs more real. Suppose you felt that there's 99 percent of a probability that human civilization is going to be destroyed in the next hundred years, but one percent chance it won't be, and that one percent offers some opportunities to do something. Well, you commit yourself to that one percent."

Noam Chomsky.

"Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, 
A medley of extemporanea; 
And love is a thing that can never go wrong; 
And I am Marie of Romania."

Dorothy Parker.

"Fuck' em."

Mick Jones.

"Oh, what's the bloody point?"

Kenneth Williams. 

"I'm a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."*

Antonio Gramsci. 

* There's some debate as to whether Gramsci ever said this, and it's nicked off someone else whatever, so don't write in Marxist pedants.

 

The Archers: Prick Up Your Ears

It's all going gay crazy in Ambridge right now.
Here is my measured and informed "tweet".

Bronze: It's Not Porn, Dear, It's Art

You can go and perv at some statues of naked dudes appreciate some classic artistic examples of the male form from antiquity at the Royal Academy's new exhibition, Bronze.

Julie Burchill: Oh Crap, She's Back!

And it's strange who falls for the moribund lure of retrophilia these days. Of course the Tories – true-blue adulterers and fornicators though they often are – have always been keen on family values and back to basics (which sound like dirt-cheap hypermarkets and are similarly appealing to skinflints). But you have gays, women and even gay women buying into the myth that things were better in the past. Dolce & Gabbana ad campaigns* have long deified the traditional Italian family – though it's interesting to consider how they as proud homosexuals would have fared if such stiflingly conformist families were still the norm. Elton John and David Furnish declare that they do not want their son, Zachary, to be an only child. Lord forbid, he might grow up a right oddball!

Julie Burchill in The Observer.

Quick media studies masterclass...

1. If a journalist calls gay men "gays" and "homosexuals" they are so hilariously out of touch with The Gays that you can dismiss all they say about us as made-up hokum.
2. That is all.

* I think Julie is confusing Dolce & Gabbana ads for ones for Dolmio. Poor love...

Boris Johnson: Endless Buggery

Boris Johnson threw down the gauntlet to David Cameron last night by publicly challenging him to impose a new wave of union reforms to combat the threat of a General Strike.
The London Mayor called on Cameron to pull Britain out of the slump by clamping down on strikes, saying it was time to stop the ‘endless buggeration’ that disrupts public services...

Mail On Sunday.
General Strike?
Buggeration?
All sounds good to me.

PS In the interests of testing the limits of freedom of speech on social media sites, I urge someone to kill this posh buffoon by poisoning one of his swan and unicorn sandwiches.