New York Times: A Plea To Pope Francis

Your Holiness,

I write to you as a Roman Catholic, a former Benedictine monk and as a gay man who has spent over 30 years serving the homeless, first as a member of the Catholic Worker Movement, and now as the founder and Executive Director of the Ali Forney Center, America’s largest center for homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth based in New York City.

I write on behalf of the homeless LGBT youths I serve. I ask you to take urgent action to protect them from the devastating consequences of religious rejection, which is the most common reason LGBT youths are driven from their homes. At the heart of the problem is that the church still teaches that homosexual conduct is a sin, and that being gay is disordered. I hope that if you understand how this

teaching tears families apart and brings suffering to innocent youths, you will end this teaching and prevent your bishops from fighting against the acceptance of LGBT people as equal members of society.

I hope that you will open your eyes and heart to the suffering of our youths. As LGBT youths are finding the courage to speak the truths of their hearts at younger ages, epidemic numbers are being rejected by their families, and driven to homelessness. The number of youths enduring this cruel fate is staggering; last year at least 200,000 LGBT youths experienced homelessness in the United States. LGBT youths make up 40% of the homeless youth population in this country, despite comprising only about 5% of the overall youth population...

From an open letter placed as a full-page ad in the New York Times on Palm Sunday by Faith In America.

May have cost $100,000 or more.

Let's hope his Holiness reads it and adjusts his views accordingly.

• Ali Forney Center and the UK's Albert Kennedy Trust.

Homosexual: The Decline And Fall Of The H Word

To most ears, it probably sounds inoffensive. A little outdated and clinical, perhaps, but innocuous enough: homosexual.

But that five-syllable word has never been more loaded, more deliberately used and, to the ears of many gays and lesbians, more pejorative.

“ ‘Homosexual’ has the ring of ‘colored’ now, in the way your grandmother might have used that term, except that it hasn’t been recuperated in the same way,” said George Chauncey, a Yale professor of history and an author who studies gay and lesbian culture.

Consider the following phrases: homosexual community, homosexual activist, homosexual marriage. Substitute the word “gay” in any of those cases, and the terms suddenly become far less loaded, so that the ring of disapproval and judgment evaporates...

The New York Times resisted the word gay until 1987, preferring homosexual (now, it prefers the word gay in most contexts). The Washington Times set off in quotes the term gay marriage until 2008. The newspaper also updated its standards that year to say the term was preferred over “homosexual marriage.”

In the early 2000s, when same-sex marriage was a brand-new concept, gays were routinely described in mainstream media as homosexuals. Today, use of the word is less and less frequent. A Google Books scan shows a sharp decline in its use in recent years after peaking around 1995.

Scholars expect the use of the term to eventually fall away entirely.

Jeremy W Peters, New York Times.

Research: How Big Is America's Closet?

WHAT percent of American men are gay? This question is notoriously difficult to answer. Historical estimates range from about 2 percent to 10 percent.

But somewhere in the exabytes of data that human beings create every day are answers to even the most challenging questions.

Using surveys, social networks, pornographic searches and dating sites, I recently studied evidence on the number of gay men. The data used in this analysis is available in highly aggregated form only and can be downloaded from publicly accessible sites. While none of these data sources are ideal, they combine to tell a consistent story.

At least 5 percent of American men, I estimate, are predominantly attracted to men, and millions of gay men still live, to some degree, in the closet. Gay men are half as likely as straight men to acknowledge their sexuality on social networks. More than one quarter of gay men hide their sexuality from anonymous surveys. The evidence also suggests that a large number of gay men are married to women.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, New York Times.

This is fascinating - a whole new way of trying to answer this and other eternal queer questions by looking at and analysing what men are actually doing and saying online.

Please read.

PS Here's Fagburn's own humble formula for working out how many gay men are there?

Homophobia: Maybe They're Not Gay

Last week a New York Times article - 'Homophobic? Maybe You're Gay' - reported on some of the recent research claiming to show that "homophobia can result, at least in part, from the suppression of same-sex desire."
As with the the other studies reported in the UK last month, this was greeted with much wild cheering and high-fiving by many gay men.
"Hey ya! Told ya so! In your face, closet case!" etc etc.
The number of tweets this unleashed, you'd think it was some kind of gay VE Day.
Why question "science" if it's telling you something you really want to - or really need to - believe?
Even if that shows a very unscientific faith over reason?
Here Daniel Engberg writes for Slate about how the NYT's study veers between stating the bleeding obvious, and some extremely questionable research methods; 'Homo Say What?'

Pinkwashing: Gay Rights As Zionist PR Tool

"In 2005, with help from American marketing executives, the Israeli government began a marketing campaign, “Brand Israel,” aimed at men ages 18 to 34. The campaign, as reported by The Jewish Daily Forward, sought to depict Israel as “relevant and modern.” The government later expanded the marketing plan by harnessing the gay community to reposition its global image.

"Last year, the Israeli news site Ynet reported that the Tel Aviv tourism board had begun a campaign of around $90 million to brand the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” The promotion, which received support from the Tourism Ministry and Israel’s overseas consulates, includes depictions of young same-sex couples and financing for pro-Israeli movie screenings at lesbian and gay film festivals in the United States. (The government isn’t alone; an Israeli pornography producer even shot a film, “Men of Israel,” on the site of a former Palestinian village.)

"The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life. Aeyal Gross, a professor of law at Tel Aviv University, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”..."

The great Sarah Schulman writing in The New York Times (surprisingly).
See if you can spot the four page (!) front-of-house foldover ad from the Israel Government Tourism Office in your favourite gay mag this month.
Don't forget to read that fascinating history of the Galilee - but see if you can spot who's missing from it?

Thought For The Day: Rich Benjamin

I PICKED up my jangling cellphone one recent Saturday to hear the elated voice of Zachary, my longtime buddy and college classmate. “I just proposed to Caroline,” Zach announced, inviting me to the wedding and angling to plot logistics. “So when are you flying in?”
“Oh, I’m not coming to your wedding,” I said.
It’s true. I’m boycotting all heterosexual weddings.
How utterly absurd to celebrate an institution that I am banned from in most of the country. It puzzles me, truth be told, that wedding invitations deluge me. Does a vegan frequent summer pig roasts? Do devout evangelicals crash couple-swapping parties? Do undocumented immigrants march in Minuteman rallies?
Heterosexual ladies and gentlemen, please. Don’t mail me that wedding invitation. It’s going straight to the bin...

Rich Benjamin in the New York Times.
Here's Rich's website - Fagburn thinks he's supercool.

Thought For The Day: Donald Trump

“It’s like in golf, a lot of people - I don’t want this to sound trivial - but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive. It’s weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can’t sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.”

Donald Trump - billionaire, TV personality, philosopher, golfer, birther and Republican presidential contender - explains his opposition to marriage equality in the New York Times.

Wikileaks 3: The Real Cover Up

The Media Research Center (Motto - "Join The Fight Against Liberal Media Bias!") are really pissed at all the pussy coverage of Bradley Manning.
'Today Show Portrays Wiki Leaker as a 'Teased' and 'Harassed' Victim of the Military'
"Instead of leading with how Army Private First Class Bradley Manning may have jeopardized national security with his document dump to WikiLeaks, NBC's chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, in his profile of Manning on Tuesday's Today show, told viewers he was the "most unlikely suspect, with a youthful smile" and portrayed him as an abused victim of the military. Miklaszewski used the New York Times' Ginger Thompson in his report to tell the tale of young man who apparently decided to avenge the abuse he had taken over the years, dating back to high school, by selling out his country."
And there's a wonderfully bonkers piece from Accuracy In Media on how the US media is covering up the fact that the Wikileaks traitor Bradley Manning is an openly gay pervert.
"As the Senate returns to Washington to debate such matters as the Pentagon’s homosexual exclusion policy, major media coverage of the disclosure of thousands of sensitive U.S. Government cables by WikiLeaks has curiously and conveniently ignored the homosexual orientation and anti-American motivation of the alleged leaker, Pfc. Bradley Manning, now in prison...
"What the [New York] Times left out of its coverage was that Manning was an open homosexual who flaunted the Pentagon’s homosexual exclusion policy without being punished for his behaviour and conduct."
Your liberal lamestream media at work!

Perhaps they have a point?
The Guardian today gives over a page to a profile of Manning, 'The Young Soldier Who Faces 52 Years In Prison Troubled soldier was arrested after apparently confessing to the leaks online'
It doesn't specify why he was "troubled".
Fagburn cannot find any mention of he's gay in The Guardian's extensive coverage this year. Why? He was out and it seems germane to his action.
There is a certain irony in The Guardian partnering WikiLeaks to publish classified information, but keeping this from its readers.
Excerpts from Manning's online chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo are here.

And finally... Amy Goodman interviews Noam Chomsky about WikiLeaks - transcript and video here.

No wait, there's more! A great piece by Glenn Greenwald on Salon.com; "As usual, for authoritarian minds, those who expose secrets are far more hated than those in power who commit heinous acts using secrecy as their principal weapon..."

President Obama: Dreams From My Gay Nanny

'A delicious little detail buried away in Norimitsu Onishi’s excellent NYT piece on the childhood of Barack Obama (then known as Barry Soetero) in Jakarta:
"His nanny was an openly gay man who, in keeping with Indonesia’s relaxed attitudes toward homosexuality, carried on an affair with a local butcher, longtime residents said. The nanny later joined a group of transvestites called Fantastic Dolls, who, like the many transvestites who remain fixtures of Jakarta’s streetscape, entertained people by dancing and playing volleyball."
From The Daily Telegraph. Err, well spotted!
Was this not mentioned in his memoir, Dreams From My Father?

The Ethics of Innuendo: "A Cat-Loving Bachelor"

There's a good piece on The Guardian's Comment Is Free by Philip Dayle today; 'Sexuality, Privacy and the Ethics of Innuendo'.
"President Obama's new chief of staff is a "cat-loving bachelor". Homeland security chief Janet Napolitano sports a buzz-cut hairstyle. Both she and new supreme court justice Elena Kagan are referred to as "childless and unmarried" – and auspiciously not "single" – the distinction being the subject of an op-ed piece by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. These stories have fuelled suspicions of homosexual orientation about these American public officials..."
Ah yes, I remember reading an op-ed yesterday about Peter Rouse, President Obama's new chief of staff, that described him as a "cat-loving bachelor" in the second sentence, and simply shuddering.
It was by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian.
Oops!

Social Attitudes Survey: Cool Aid

Has America finally crossed the Rubicon?
Yes, another one.
According to a new survey conducted by Gallup; "Americans' support for the moral acceptability of gay and lesbian relations crossed the symbolic 50% threshold in 2010. At the same time, the percentage calling these relations "morally wrong" dropped to 43%, the lowest in Gallup's decade-long trend."
The pollster's annual Values and Beliefs survey shows there has been a significant increase in public acceptance of gay relationships since 2006. But they note that the most marked the change is among men, particularly men under 50, where it's up by 20 points to 62%.
New York Times' columnist Charles M Blow thinks this is "stunning".
I think he's right.
Blow argues that much of this attitudinal change is down to "The contact hypothesis"; "As more men openly acknowledge that they are gay, it becomes harder for men who are not gay to discriminate against them. And as that group of openly gay men becomes more varied — including athletes, celebrities and soldiers — many of the old, derisive stereotypes lose their purchase. To that point, a Gallup poll released last May found that people who said they personally knew someone who was gay or lesbian were more likely to be accepting of gay men and lesbians in general and more supportive of their issues."
He concludes; "It’s like being antigay is becoming the old gay. Not cool."
But Blow puts this down to the fact that "virulent homophobes are increasingly being exposed for engaging in homosexuality", citing as examples the "disgraced" evangelist preacher Ted Haggard and George Rekers, the anti-gay Baptist minister who was caught taking a rent boy on a European vacation last month.
But doesn't that mean that many young men now think that homophobia is... gay?