Zoolander 2: Call To Boycott All

Telegraph.

Oh, please.

This is the sort of thing the LGBT media do.

Even thousands of people clicking on an online petition is pretty meaningless in the general scheme of things.

Remember the call to boycott Star Wars VII as it 'promotes white genocide' - a couple of racist cunts used it as a hashtag and it became a HUGE NEWS STORY!

Here's an e-petition to Boycott 50 Shades Of Grey - 'Say no to abuse'.

And don't get me started on Frozen -  'I could blatantly see the homosexual agenda...'

I think this cute little movie is going to indoctrinate my 5-year-old to be a lesbian or treat homosexuality or bestiality in a light sort of way. - See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/swanson-disneys-frozen-satanic-push-turn-kids-gay#sthash.809jOz8o.dpuf

I think this cute little movie is going to indoctrinate my 5-year-old to be a lesbian or treat homosexuality or bestiality in a light sort of way. - See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/swanson-disneys-frozen-satanic-push-turn-kids-gay#sthash.809jOz8o.dpuf

I think this cute little movie is going to indoctrinate my 5-year-old to be a lesbian or treat homosexuality or bestiality in a light sort of way. - See more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/swanson-disneys-frozen-satanic-push-turn-kids-gay#sthash.809jOz8o.dpuf

Or how about one man's crass 'campaign' to 'Drop the T in LGBT'?

Sake.

PS Will you sign my petition to ban online petitions?, James North.

Pink News: The Most Homosexual News Story Of All Time!

Baby joy for Benedict Cumberbatch and Sophie Hunter http://t.co/Vs987iWmdv pic.twitter.com/AO0GtxFasx

— PinkNews (@pinknews) June 13, 2015

Why?

PS Or howsabout this absolute humdinger of not-actually-gay-news from Gay Star News!

Alan Turing: The Imitation Gay

It was impossible not to be moved by Imitation Game screenwriter Graham Moore's Oscar acceptance speech about his teen suicide attempt. However, The Imitation Game itself is a steaming pile of homophobic and misogynistic crap.

Wait, isn't the movie all "yayz for the gayz?" That's the bandwagon it tries to ride, but it does so by serving up a giant helping of last-century stereotypes that any Republican senator would find comforting. (It's also factually wrong in dozens of ways.) 

Above all, the Imitation Turing, though persecuted for his sexuality, demonstrates no sexuality at all in the movie. He's a celibate queer martyr. The most graphic scene isn't graphic at all. He merely talks about "paying another man to touch my penis." According to the movie, this handsome, athletic and charming man has to pony up cash just to get a hand job.

As Christian Caryl writes in the New York Review of Books, this movie "can't bring itself to show him kissing another man -- something he did frequently, and with gusto. And it most definitely doesn't show him cruising New York's gay bars, or popping off on a saucy vacation to one of the less reputable of the Greek islands" (as he did in 1953 after his hormone punishment ended).

The Hollywood Turing is just a collection of anti-gay clichés rolled into one -- a rich, precious and bitchy snot. He has no personal power, needing a good (straight) woman to take care of him and tattling to Winston Churchill when he doesn't get his way...

Mark Saltveit, Proud Queer Monthly.

Hahaha, I love this man.

Guy Burgess: Stranger In Moscow

An interview recorded with Soviet spy Guy Burgess in Moscow in 1959 and lost for over 50 years has been discovered.

Recorded by Canada's CBC it is believed to be the only filmed interview with Burgess.

The notorious old poove appears to be very, very drunk.

More footage can be viewed on the BBC News website - a full report will be shown on Newsnight this evening. [Edit: 10.45 in here. LOL intro by Evan Davis; 'He was gay before it was allowed...']

PS Here's Benedict Cumberbatch as Burgess in The Turning Point. 1982 Newsnight feature on the opening of Another Country, with Rupert Everett as 'Guy Bennett'. Thought Alan Bennett's An Englishman Abroad would be on YouTube, but sadly no... [Edit: A devoted reader has pointed out it's on something called Vimto x].

The Imitation Game: Imitations Of Life

Was there a version of the script where Turing has a male lover?
First of all, the time period we’re all focusing on, he didn’t have one. He described it in his own words as a “sexual desert” in a letter. The whole thing is his relationship with Christopher [Turing’s male crush seen in flashbacks in grade school], about unfulfilled love.

But Turing did have relationships with men.
He had people he had sex with, yes — especially in the time after the war, when he’s living in Manchester. The break-in that happens in the film is a male lover, which is discussed. It was actually someone he paid to have sex with. It was more of a hustler.

But we never see Turing in a relationship with an adult man. Don’t you think that would have enriched the character?
Not really. The whole movie, the way it’s structured, we don’t know anything about this man. The whole investigation starts because he’s hiding something, but he’s not hiding what we think. It can’t start off with him having sex. It was not because we were afraid it would offend anybody. If I did the structure and had this thing about a straight character, I would never have a sex scene to prove that he’s heterosexual. If I have a gay character in a movie, I need to have a sex scene in it — just to prove that he’s gay? I’m not shying away from it. His whole relationship, how he falls in love and the importance of him being a gay man, was all about secrecy.

Some have criticized the movie for not including that.
During his time, the relationship that was important was the relationship with Joan Clarke [played by Keira Knightley]. They were engaged for six months. It’s all about a lost love. He didn’t have a male companion. He had some random people he had sex with. He also had, this was funny, he went to Norway to have sex in a gay sauna, a secret club. He had some sexual partners, but it was few and far between. The only reason to have a sex scene in the film would be to satisfy critics who feels that every gay character needs to have a gay sex scene....

From an Oscars night interview in Variety with The Imitation Game director, Morten Tyldum.

What a funny little man.

No, of course you don't need a gay sex scene just cause a character's gay.

The point is why Turing's homosexuality - something instrumental, not incidental to his story - was so downplayed.

Fagburn's Oscars wishlist - anyone but Cummerbund. 

The Imitation Game: Making A Code

Respected straight actor plays tortured gay man? It's movie awards gold!

But what that galaxy of stars on the poster doesn't tell you is that even the most glowing reviewers had some serious reservations.

A problem summed up in the headline in The Independent, Benedict Cumberbatch's Alan Turing is superb - but the film is evasive over the character's sexuality.

The Daily Telegraph elaborates;

It's the lack of risk here that grates most. Turing was homosexual, got convicted for gross indecency in 1952, and committed suicide because of his persecution and loneliness. Cumberbatch can suggest all this, but only in outline, because the film backs away in embarrassment from showing a single encounter between him and another man. 

This project inches around the private life of a genius: though he gets to narrate, it adopts an extremely proper attitude towards what should stay private, which might strike some viewers as closer to 1952's prudishness than 2014's relative open-mindedness. 

It shouldn't matter in the slightest that Turing was gay. It shouldn't have ended his career in disgrace the way it did. But one can be forgiven, surely, for wondering, and wanting to see, if it mattered to him.

Peter Tatchell reminds Telegraph readers, Homophobia is still with us 60 years after the death of Alan Turing.

And the hundreds of comments from Telegraph readers show how right he is.

Mr Tatchell, most people welcome I'm sure the more enlightened times that we live in and are pleased to see the back of the pernicious laws that made life so miserable for Homosexuals. But please don't confuse a sense of weary indignation as being homophobia at having our noses rubbed in homosexuality (as well as diversity), and at having laws put on the statute books to try and normalise the abnormal. etc etc.

It's four stars from The Times, but they warn;

Directed by Morten Tyldum, the story goes from the homosexual and mathematical crushes of Turing’s Sherborne schooldays in 1928 to 1951, when detectives arrived at a botched burglary at the professor’s house in Manchester and began the investigation that led to his eventual prosecution for “gross indecency” and chemical castration at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Yet, mysteriously, we never see Turing in an adult sexual relationship with another man.

All this sits uncomfortably with the rest of the detail provided: Turing’s gay crushes at school, his friendships, his near-marriage, his listlessness under chemical castration. Why not provide the missing piece of the human jigsaw and show that Turing could have as much passion for a man as he did for the Enigma machine? Do we detect the cold hand of the producers, who include American Harvey Weinstein, on the script, sanitising the story for the middlebrow and American market?

Tyldum is probably not to blame — the director’s fondness for dark, twisted drama was revealed in his recent Headhunters — but The Imitation Game has a whiff of Sunday evening telly conventionality. Either Turing’s hidden homosexuality should have been properly handled, or the drama should have focused purely on Hut 8.

Their review is complimented by an article; The Imitation Game’s makers on accusations of masking Turing’s sexuality

The oft-repeated complaint that the film doesn't show Turing being intimate with a gentleman has not been plucked from the pink ether either, an earlier script had a gay sex scene.

The Times quote the ever-hopeless Benedict Cumberbatch; “I would have been happy to play one of those [sex] scenes or not because to me it’s less about his sexuality than it is about love. That he loved men was just a fact for him.”

Good grief.

PS Did anyone else think the timing of Benedict's announcement of his engagement (to a lady!) just last week was, erm, timely?

Cumberbatch: Simpleton

Interviewed by [Andrew] Marr – who labelled him "the man they call Britain's favourite otter" [!!??] – Cumberbatch also defended The Imitation Game against suggestions that the film doesn't pay enough attention to Bletchley Park code-breaker Alan Turing's homosexuality.

"I don’t quite know what that means because to me his sexuality is very, very clear in the film. Because we don’t show him in bed with anybody? We don’t show anyone who’s heterosexual having a moment of sexual intimacy in the film.

"The specific importance of his sexuality is the fact that it was criminalised by that society at that time and that he was punished after saving the democracy and government that was in power by that democracy and government for his identity. And I just hope that this film is about his achievements, is about his life, is about his loves as well – and it is about his sexuality and that’s very, very strongly part of his identity, both in the film and his story."

Yet more first-class guff from upper-class twit Little Lord Cumberbatch in the new Radio Times.

See also...

Lucky readers of yesterday's Sunday Telegraph got a chance to pick up a copy of Andrew Hodge's Turing biography - an official tie-in to the release this week of The Imitation Game.

Interesting, as Hodges has denounced the film's heterosexualisation of Turing.

Fagburn notes the free book is an abridged version. 

I wonder which bits they left out?

Unthought For The Day: Benedict Cumberbatch

‘For me there’s explicit love in the film, and the fact of his sexuality being homosexual doesn’t make any difference. If it would have added to the film, we’d have done it. I’d have no qualms about filming those scenes, expressing that side of a character’s relationship to his body. It’s partly to do with the logical loop of the film, the poetical loop. It’s about what’s not seen, it’s about secrets, what’s repressed – and his sexuality was. This is a man who’s never going to be allowed to love, and that’s really his tragedy and the tragedy of the film...

‘It sort of is, but more important is the idea that the man at the centre of it, who was persecuted for being different, still stands sadly for a lot of persecution that goes on around the world today. That’s what terrifies me – that it's as prevalent now, and that this is how we treated one of our war heroes, and a great scientist, someone who’s up there with Charles Darwin; he should be on banknotes. I don’t think Alan set himself up as a martyr, but he sure as hell was treated as one in a sense.’

Cumberbatch’s voice rises in indignation. ‘This was 60 years ago – here, in this country! Giving a man injections to turn him into something desexualised, that ruined his brain. He was being given weekly oestrogen doses and at one point the doctor said, this is a bit embarrassing for both us; why don’t I give you an implant so you don’t have to keep coming back for these appointments every week. He was given the implant in his thigh. It was supposed to stop after two years, and it didn’t.

‘A colleague of his whom I spoke to told me Turing had said, “It’s not really cricket, is it” – being wry and humorous about it. But then one night he pulled out a carving knife from the kitchen drawer and tried to gouge it out of his body.’ Cumberbatch sighs deeply. ‘To reach that state of mind... The only thing he had left to love – that he was legally allowed to love – was his work, and even that was denied him, to the extent that he took his own life by swallowing cyanide.’

The hilariously thick and insincere Benedict Cumberbatch in the Sunday Telegraph. 

Oh do shut up!

Alan Turing probably didn't commit suicide - though that rather spoils the myth of The Great Gay Martyr - and I'm pretty sure he'd shudder at the very thought of being put on a sodding banknote. 

This profile also contains the classic line/lie; Turing 'invented the early computing machine that cracked the German Enigma code.'

It didn't - that was the work of three Polish mathematicians; Jerzy Rozycki, Henryk Zygalski and Marian Rejewski.

Can they be on a banknote, Ben?

• Images by Darren and Polari magazine. x

I'd rather catch my Dad dancing in a local night club to Rhianna or wearing a nose ring than to see him like this: pic.twitter.com/1X1S0w6ykb
— Madeleine Teahan (@MadeleineTeahan) October 28, 2014

£45 t-shirt made in 62p an hour sweatshop claim.

These 'This is what a feminist looks like' t-shirts were made for the Fawcett Society - current chair, Angela Mason, ex-head of Stonewall and former cadre of anarcho-terrorist gang, the Angry Brigade.

Benedict Cumberbatch: Plus 84 Things We Love About Iceland

“He wasn’t someone who purposefully put himself in the way of things as a protest — he was just a great role model for anyone who’s different or feels different,” says Cumberbatch. “And it’s tragic because you look at every single trajectory in his life and understand completely why he was different, why he stuttered, why he was isolated in his work. [You also see] why he was useless with men in any form of relationship — because he’d never experienced the love he deserved. And yet, within that, this man invented the idea of mechanizing mathematics — of a computer. He conquered, through cryptography, the Enigma code, which means he saved millions of lives, and, even as his body was morphing, was doing work on how the environment causes cellular structures to change. I mean, God knows, he probably would be celebrated as someone like Bill Gates. Without the shadow of a doubt, he would be held as a totem of the modern world.”

Mere words can not begin to describe how bowel-crackingly awful this interview is...

Perhaps the final proof that going to a very fine private school can't stop you from being very, very thick.

I give up!

Benedict Cumberbatch: Imitations Of Heterosexuality

Benedict Cumberbatch has defended the decision not to include overt gay sex scenes in his latest movie, The Imitation Game.

The British actor plays genius codebreaker Alan Turing who helps the Allies defeat the German Nazis in World War II, only to be criminally prosecuted for being a homosexual when he is caught with a 19-year-old man in 1952.

Some critics have asked why sex does not feature in the film but according to Cumberbatch, it is "not an exploration of someone's sex life".

"He's chemically castrated because he admits to being a homosexual; he talks about entreating a young man to touch his penis. I mean, it's pretty explicit," he told The Wrap last month.

"If you need to see that to understand that he's gay, then all is lost for any kind of subtle storytelling. The conversations are so naked in themselves that the idea of having to see two naked men wasn't something I ever thought was missing in the script." ...

The Independent.

No reason to show Mr Turing doing it with a dude, of course, though this seems odd when the film has been criticised for focusing on a fictionalised relationship with a female colleague.

And seeing as his life and career were pretty much ruined by a prosecution for gross indecency, I'd've thought his 'sex life' would be pretty central to any telling of his story.

PS Here's The Wrap interview - not sure why this has surfaced now.

Update: The ever-baffling Mr Cucumberpatch at a London Film Festival press conference...

"His sexuality is something contained that is expressed in the film but not shown explicitly. There is no heterosexuality expressed in the film. So what we show in his behaviour is sadly true to his story. He had to suppress his sexuality, make it private, make it something secret. When he talks about his sexuality in the film it shows his complete honesty, guilelessness, innocence. He was aware of the risks but at the same time wasn't willing to cave in to the intolerance and potential permutations of confessing such a thing. Some people own him as martyr or as standard-bearer for a cause. I think he was just very true to himself, which is a form of martyrdom, but he didn't make a political statement out of it."

No idea. Anyone?

The Imitation Game: Straight Up

The Independent.

Seeing as Cumberbatch has Alan Turing falling in love with a woman, I think it's Oscars all round.

Update: Benedict Cumberbatch talks crap to the Daily Beast...

The only thing that’s in contention, really, is whether he died by accident or on purpose. His suicide note is framed to make it look like an accident. His coroner’s report said that it was a solution of cyanide and water, and then there was a bite of the apple.

There was no suicide note and the apple was not tested for cyanide.

He goes on, equally witlessly...

Who’s Lord McNally? Well, he’s probably gay. They’re always the biggest homophobes.

Which is a homophobic cliché.

Which proves one of the benefits of a private education; the ability to talk absolute rubbish with absolute confidence.

Turing: Trailer

'Based on a true story' where he appears to be in love with a dame.

PS Pet Shop Boys' Alan Turing Proms piece, A Man From The Future, is broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on Wednesday.

Alan Turing: Is That It?

Alan Turing died on June 7th 1954.

He was 41.

Nobody can be certain if his death by cyanide poisoning was suicide or a tragic accident.

Despite what you may read or hear elsewhere today.

So, what's going on? Tortured Genius: What was Alan Turing really like? BBC World Service. Benedict Cumberbatch outwits Nazis in The Imitation Game - First Look Entertainment Weekly. Alan Turing: 60 Years On Huffington Post (Hopeless). Turing2014: Can machines think? @ Royal Society, London...

Err, I hope this isn't it.

Alan at school, 1923, by his mother, Ethel.

• Alan Turing: The Enigma Andrew Hodges' website. The Turing Digital Archive.

Sunday Times
A Man From The Future is sold out - but some tickets will be available on the night. 

Sherlock: Elementary, My Dear Cumberbatch

‘Sometimes the right man and the right part comes along and they fuse.

‘I think there is something about Sherlock Holmes, which has possibly always been the case – there’s a kind of unapproachability about him. He’s not interested in sex… apparently. So you immediately get that Mr Darcy thing going on.

‘He can’t be tamed. It’s attractive. Those are the people we are attracted to – the ones that aren’t interested.

‘I think it’s that and the combination of the Byronic looks that Benedict has – and the coat! – that’s made him into, possibly, the first sexy Sherlock Holmes.’

Mark Gatiss talking to Metro about his strange fascination with Sherlock Holmes and Benedict Cumberbatch, at London Lesbian And Gay Switchboard's 40th birthday party last night. *

He also said Sherlock may bot be back until 2016. 

The Imitation Game, Mr Cabbagepatch's Alan Turing biopic, is due at the of this year.

* LLGS 0300 330 630.

Update: How Gay Star News excitedly covered Switchboard's 40th anniversary...

*Doffs cap* Thank you ma'am!

But which modest gay campaigner do we really have to thank for this historic achievement?

Sherlock: Detective Work

Oh look! The Star's run another one of those things about gay subtexts - and not-so-subtexts - in Sherlock.
Exciting.
And here's one on BBC News online!
Mind you, the Telegraph blog predicts next season "homosexuality will be made compulsory on pain of death."
I think he's joking.
Was yesterday a bank holiday by any chance?

PS A quick Youtube compilation of some of Sherlock's gay/not-gay greatest hits. 

Patrick Smugtwit: No Shit Sherlock!

Have you noticed Holmes and Watson in TV's hit TV show Sherlock are having a "bromance"?

Probably not - but I have!

But what is a "bromance", I hear you ask.

If you Google it you will discover that it is a combination of two words; "bro" and "romance".

ie It is a romance between bros [ie brothers, but not literally].

Now it has come to my attention that some people think this means that TV's Holmes and Watson are gays!

This is yet another example of HOMOPHOBIA!

Imagine if they said they were black people??!!

No, they are just good friends.

There are many other "bromances" in films and TV at the moment, and I will Google them later and add a list.

How far we have come since the 1970s, when Morecambe and Wise lay side-by-side in bed, watched by a nation so green as to fail to see anything blue. 

Even though they did, a sub-editor has added.

And how far we have come since the 1980s, when the homoerotic frisson between the unerringly heterosexual Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer, as Maverick and Iceman in Top Gun, went unacknowledged.

Except by everyone who acknowledged this, you ignoramus, the sub-editor has added.

But what does this all mean?

Well, if you ask me, it shows the times they are a-changing for heterosexual men.

Or as I call them "meterosexuals"!

You could say, it's elementary, my dear Watson!!!
Hahaha!

The ever brilliant and profound Patrick Smugtwit writes.

This thought-provoking piece was written following the virtual controversy when Caitlin Moran asked Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman to read some gaysexy hot Sherlock fanfic at a BFI screening.

Mic Wright responds here.

Brian Epstein: The Life Of Brian

"Brian was a gay man living in a country where gay sex was still a felony. The year he died, 1967, was supposed to be the Summer of Love. But that was only if you happened to be into the right variety of love.

"Naturally I hope our book will be a treat for fans of The Beatles. But what inspired me even more was the human struggle Brian Epstein faced.

"His homosexuality and his attitude to it wasn't the whole story, but it was a big part of it."

Vivek Tiwary, author of a new graphic novel, The Fifth Beatle, in BBC News magazine.

He could have pointed out here the cruel irony that 1967 was also the year that homosexuality was decriminalised in England. 

Check out the all-singing, all-swinging website - they say the book is soon to be a major motion picture.

But there are always rumours that someone's making a major motion picture about Brian.
Last month it was "confirmed" Benedict Cumberbatch will star in a biopic.

Wish someone would.

Alan Turing: Cryptanalyst With Attitude

One of six Attitude Awards edition covers.
Shame they couldn't find a shirtless pic.
And as David Jørgensen has pointed out, it seems odd Alan Turing is an "icon", while Cher is a "legend".

There's a habit to fetishise and mythologise Turing as the great gay martyr (he may not have committed suicide, and if he did there's no clear link between it and his arrest and treatment, and he was just one of over 16,000 British men convicted for now legal homosexual acts), who broke the Enigma Code (he didn't), single-handedly won the Second World War, and invented the computer (he didn't), but I must confess I like this cover and - oh dear - actually find it rather moving in its understatement. 

I'm sure Alan would have found it all a bit embarrassing though.

PS "First look at Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game'!

Update: Hilariously, The Sun covered the Attitude Awards by running photos of some of the famous sexy ladies who turned up.

Chelsea Manning: Corrections And Clarifications

A subheading on an interview with Benedict Cumberbatch (Wanted man, 14 September, page 34, Weekend) said he talked about "why Chelsea Manning deserved her sentence". This did not accurately reflect a long and nuanced interview in which Cumberbatch said that though he thought the sentence was very severe, he understood why Manning had to be convicted. Since the interview, he has clarified that he thinks Manning should be pardoned, but that that is unlikely to happen.

The Guardian. 

The actual paragraph reads;

As for Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning, the young US army officer who leaked hundreds of thousands of war logs, diplomatic cables and other US state secrets to Assange and has just been sentenced to 35 years, Cumberbatch is sympathetic on a human level. "But he broke a law. He knew what he was doing." Manning has applied for a presidential pardon, but Cumberbatch can't see why Obama should grant it. "He did what he did out of a conviction that an alarm bell needed to be sounded. But his superiors might have been right to say to him, it's not your position to be worried about it within the hierarchy of the military organisation, which is why he had to be sentenced. He took an oath, and he broke that oath."

The journalist, Decca Aitkenhead, commented astutely; "This sounds to me like the former public schoolboy in Cumberbatch speaking..."

After Cumberbatch complained about being misrepresented, The Guardian published online an unedited transcript of his comments on Chelsea.
Here's a withering critique of Cucumberpatch's words by Alexander Reed Kelly on Truthdig; "What is heartbreaking about this set of sentences? Aside from the abandonment of the notion that individuals are obligated to the best of their ability to discover and struggle for what is right—especially as they grow up—it’s the contradiction involved in simultaneous claims to sympathy for one’s fellow humans and unthinking deference to authority."

• Queer+ Friends Of Chelsea Manning.

Cumberbatch is set to play Alan Turing in a biopic. Fagburn wonders if BC believes Turing deserved to be arrested and chemically castrated, too.