Pete Burns: 1959-2016

The man behind this colossal SAW single.

The master/mistress of not giving a fuck.

Seeing Pete play at The Cock was one of the best hours of my life.

Thanks for everything.

x

UKIP: Top Bantz!

Independent.

Gay Marriage: Gay Cakes, Gay Fuckwittery

Independent.

I don't give a fuck if someone wants a gay cake or or if someone won't make it.

Can you think of a list of messages a baker wouldn't want to ice?

Lets' start with - by way of example - a cake reading ' DEATH TO THE GAYS!'

People can just say no, you know.

Stefano Brizzi: Worst Date EVER!!!

Times.

Alan Bennett: Query

I hear word Dame Alan may have a book coming out - can anyone confirm this?

Bob Dylan: Nobel Prize For Literature Winner

Fagburn: Sisyphus Is Taking A Break

Attitude: Exciting News!

Exciting news to start the week - we're under new ownership! https://t.co/W097g7NUmC pic.twitter.com/gigu9MhLOX

— Attitude (@AttitudeMag) 3 October 2016

In no way has the British gay media gone into meltdown.

This may be one reason why Matthew Todd walked last month.

Have the feeling there won't be an issue in 2017.

Could be wrong.

'Stream Publishing’s award-winning contract publishing portfolio includes titles produced for blue-chip clients CityJet, Cunard, Flybe, Hertz, Liberty, McColl’s Retail Group, P&O Cruises, SPAR and Vauxhall‎, as well as the wholly-ownedWinq, the luxury lifestyle magazine for gay men.'

Maybe not.

PS Who the felch would want to read anything after these cover lines?

And who the fuck is Nyle Dmarco?

Sorry, but this looks like patronising 'right-on' tokenism.

£5 for something boring you could read for free in QX!

Camp: Indecent Acts

A thoughtful piece on Consented by Tom Ana, but it confuses camp - an act or affectation - with effeminacy - how we are.*

* Well, some of us, anyway.

Mail On Sunday: What A Load Of Wank (As Per)

Mail On Sunday.

Oh do piss off.

You had a five minute slot on a radio comedy show that runs twelve weeks a year.

You were elbowed out cause the BBC has an admirable commitment to not just having a load of blokes on programmes like that, and you were the unfunniest.

Race never entered into it.

Arthur Russell: Vanished Into Music

The writer Olivia Laing presents an imaginative portrait of Arthur Russell.

Arthur Russell was a cellist, a composer, a songwriter and a disco auteur. He was active in the New York downtown scene of the 1970s and was a frequent collaborator with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Philip Glass. Although extremely prolific, his inability to finish projects is often cited as part of the reason that very little of his music was released during his lifetime.

When Arthur Russell died in 1992 his Village Voice obituary read, "Arthur's songs were so personal that it seems as though he simply vanished into his music."

Please listen to this beautiful programme about Arthur Russell and his beautiful music on BBC iPlayer.

NB The actual opening description in the programme is; 'His name is Arthur Russell. He's 35. He's a gay man, a Buddhist, a cellist, a country singer, an avant garde composer, a disco queen. He's the greatest musician you've never heard of.'

Why did the BBC website delete all the gay stuff?

PS Watch David Byrne, Philip Glass and Allen Ginsberg chat about their friend and collaborator Arthur.

Queer Progress: From Homophobia To Homonationalism

From its beginning – a carefully written review of key concepts such as materialism, liberalism, Keynesian economics, and gay liberation – it’s clear that Queer Progress is in the business of analysis as much as it is about telling a crucial story. But the two aspects are thoughtfully intertwined, with McCaskell identifying examples of, say, left opportunism at work in the disruptions of gay conferences by revolutionary Marxist groups, or early rhetorical shifts toward respectability and away from sexual liberation.

The latter implies the book’s central question: where and how did a movement that vociferously defended sexual deviance, and that universally distrusted the state, get replaced by a politics that shies away from radical sexuality and unquestioningly lauds a wonky, government-approved vision of gay rights? A queer sort of “progress” indeed...

From a review on Quill & Quire.

Queer Progress: From Homophobia To Homonationalism, Tim McCaskell (Between The Lines).

Julien Macdonald: Unlike You

Guardian.

He studied at Brighton Art College - and he was an annoying ugly prissy pissy queen then, too.

You'd take tips on what to look like from someone that looks like that?

Freak.

Hillary Clinton: Power Bottom Indeed

In an email sent to his business partner and Democratic fundraiser Jeffrey Leeds, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote of Hillary Clinton, “Everything HRC touches she kind of screws up with hubris.”

Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State during Barack Obama’s first term was an unmitigated disaster for many nations around the world. Neither the Donald Trump campaign nor the corporate media have adequately described how a number of countries around the world suffered horribly from Mrs. Clinton’s foreign policy decisions.

Millions of people were adversely harmed by Clinton’s misguided policies and her “play-to-pay” operations involving favors in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative.

Here is a before and after chart illustrating, country by country, the destabilizing effects of Clinton’s policies as Secretary of State...

Infowars - now read on.

Her neo-conservative neo-imperialism has fucked over at least 27 countries, fags adoration of this evil woman appals me.

Hari Kunzru: On Cultural Appropriation

Clearly, if writers were barred from creating characters with attributes that we do not “own” (gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on), fiction would be impossible. Stories would be peopled by clones of the author. Since trespassing into otherness is a foundation of the novelist’s work, should we restrict ourselves in some way, so as to avoid doing violence to those who identify with our characters? The injunction to refrain from “cultural appropriation” sounds like a call for censorship, or at best a warning to self-censor, an infringement of the creative liberty to which so many surprising people profess themselves attached.

It is true that the politics of offence are used to shut down dissident voices of all kinds, frequently in minority communities, and the understanding of culture as a type of property to which ownership can be definitively assigned is, at the very least, problematic. Should the artist go forth boldly, without fear? Of course, but he or she should also tread with humility. Note that I do not say, “with care”. I don’t believe any subject matter should a priori be off limits to anyone, or that harm necessarily flows from the kind of ventriloquism that all novelists perform. Quite the opposite. Attempting to think one’s way into other subjectivities, other experiences, is an act of ethical urgency. For those who have never experienced the luxury of normativity, the warm and fuzzy feeling of being the world’s default setting, humility in the face of otherness seems like a minimal demand. Yet it appears that for some, the call to listen before speaking, to refrain from asserting immediate authority, is so unfamiliar that it feels outrageous. I’m being silenced! My freedom is being abridged! Norm is unaccustomed to humility because he has grown up as master of the house. All the hats are his to wear. For the deviant others, who came in by the kitchen door, it has always been expected, even demanded...

Guardian Books.

Other authors' opinions are available.

Into The Outside: The Story So Far

Into the Outside is a major, multi-partner heritage-learning project with local young people, re-examining the city’s rich LGBTQ+ past and creating a new archive of queer youth experiences.

The exhibition charts the progress of the project and includes creative writing, photography and archive material.

Supported by respected photographer Helen Cammock, young participants are examining how issues faced today by young people identifying as LGBTQ+ compare with those faced by young LGBTQ+ people over the past forty years.

Participants are exploring a range of archive materials, including the National Lesbian and Gay Survey – an extraordinary collection of autobiographical writing and ephemera submitted by over 700 people between 1986 and 1994.

A collaboration with the Mass Observation Archive, Brighton & Hove Libraries Service, the East Sussex Record Office and Queer in Brighton.

University of Brighton Galleries – Grand Parade, 58-67 Grand Parade BN2 0JY. 1st October to 30th October. Free.

Download the beautiful exhibition guide here.