Thought For The Day: Lana Pillay

In a weird, warped way, I suppose you end up thanking all your adversaries, for teaching you how to be a twat back! They teach you how to defend yourself, how to understand the cognitive deficiency that motivates people to use others as a punch-bag for their own neurosis and insecurities. 

Lana Pillay, from an essay - part memoir, part queer polemic - for OuThere magazine.

Any friend of the late Leigh Bowery and Mark E Smith is a friend of mine... x

Dedication Of The Day: Michael Gove

“On behalf of teachers I'd like to dedicate this award to Michael Gove and I mean dedicate in the Anglo Saxon sense which means insert roughly into the anus of.”

Michael Steer, a maths teacher featured in Channel 4's Education Yorkshire, collecting the Royal Television Society Award for best documentary series.

Stephen Fry won best presenter for Out There.

Bless.

Russia: Stephen Fry!

The Times - Snore!

Stephen Fry's Out There: No Gay Sex Please, We're British!

In part two of Around The World In 80 Gays, national treasure Stephen Fry pays (literally) flying visits to Brazil, Russia and India...
Same as before, two things were striking; Fry does seem to have a big problem with (gay) sex - you may recall he was famously and vocally celibate for many years, and often spoke of his disgust at the very thought of making the beast with one back.*
In this context his simple, simplistic conclusion to the programme, "It's all about love" seemed telling.
Or do I mean damning?
The only bodily fluids Stephen Fry enjoyed sharing were tears.
And boy did he cry a lot, with joy and with pain.
Boo hoo, squish squish.
TV documentaries rely on this emotional pornography.
They are politically crude, tending to go to extremes - here the grieving mother, the pantomime villain politician - that may cast more shade than light on the viewer's understanding of what life's really like for ordinary LGBT people.
Fry also went into one of his trademark patronising patrician rants about how these people are not "educated".
See also him saying they're "backwards" and "uncivilised".
You can take the man out of the public school, but you can't take...
On the positive, he was good again at reminding viewers how anti-gay laws and prejudices are a legacy of colonialism.
In the final scene, he's speaking at a gay bar in Mumbai, congratulating the patrons, and just as you're thinking; "Yes, Stephen, but you're talking to members of the English-speaking, western-oriented, middle-class elite...", he basically says this himself - and signs off by hoping their freedoms will soon come to the hijras in the slums.
One of the strengths of this episode was how he repeatedly stressed that trans people - from drag queens in Sao Paolo to the hijra of Mumbai - are often the worst treated of all the four letters in the LGBT community, by both the straight world and our own.

The segment on Russia - boo hiss etc - was by far the weakest and seemed rather odd.
He interviewed Vitaly Milonov, the St Petersburg politician who'd introduced a local law banning "promotion of homosexuality", which has now notoriously gone nationwide.
But everything we saw suggested this wasn't actually being enforced; Fry, a best-selling celebrity over there we learned, began by meeting members of a lesbian and gay group still freely operating out of their nice offices, and ended by promoting homosexuality to a large group of Russian journalists.
At one point he asked a lesbian mother; "Do you think that we'll see a day when you will be threatened by this law?"
Note this is a hypothetical question about the future, not what's happening now.
Similarly, despite all the "This is how Hitler started!" hysteria by some in the West over Russia's own Section 28, several Russian LGBT campaigners have said they doubt the law will be applied generally.
The take-home quote from this programme, instantly, endlessly tweeted and RT-ed as soon as the credits started rolling, was; "Homosexuals aren't interested in making other people homosexual; homophobics are interested in making other people homophobic."
A nice platitude, though for the  record, can Fagburn put the record straight and state he is interested in making other people homosexual?

* See this post on the blog, Towards Queer...

Stephen Fry's Out There: Actually Quite Good, Perversely

There are people who are so rabidly homophobic, and I just find that fascinating - it's as if you met someone who has absolutely spent all their life trying to get rid of red telephones. You'd go 'What?' You wouldn't understand it. Why would you so bother to attack a group of people who really do them no harm.
This is a series about gay people and the trouble people have accepting them...

While Elton and David have done much to encourage a change in attitudes to gay people here, I'm keen to know more about what it means to be gay elsewhere in the world...

Okay.
I have to admit I thought I'd hate this and would end up screaming at the wind about how England's leading poshgay "national treasure" was saying how it had all gone wrong since we lost the colonies, but no.
This was pretty good, actually.
It wasn't aimed at cynical old pooves like me, anyway, but more at members of the so-called heterosexual community in middle England - it was TV Pick Of The Day in the Express - and it did that well.
It was a nice BBC2 programme, for Chomsky's sake, you can't expect Democracy Now!
Although bookended with Fry talking to gay celebrity zillionaires married with kids etc in Windsor and Hollywood - who are clearly livin' the Western dream LGBT Africans must aspire to, as indeed must we all - it did stress our Christian colonial legacy when talking about Uganda ("We brought you a bible...").
Further; "Perversely the philosophy that underpins this twisted idea comes from the land that gave birth to gay liberation."
America riddled with homophobia shock!
Let's get an e-petition going and boycott Disneyland.
Even when talking about Iran, Stephen Fry at least implied he agreed it was a propaganda fiction that men are hanged "just for being gay".
If you get killed "just for being gay" in Iran they're not doing a very good job of it.
Remember when the media was filled with horror stories about anti-gay atrocities in Iran?
Most were made-up, but now forgotten, as Russia has become our big "illiberal" bogeyman again.
Funny that.
He often came across as a patronising public school housemaster scoffing at peoples' "silliness".
And, perversely, it was Fry who seemed to be the person who seemed most obsessed with anal sex.
He kept bringing it up - stressing he'd never done it - and saying being gay is all about love.
But gay men around the world tend to get arrested for sodomy, not sending valentine's cards.
Spoiler alert! The coming out of the "ex-gay" as an ex-ex gay was a stroke of televisual genius.
Fagburn also liked Stephen Fry reading out the Ugandan newspaper headline; 'How Bum-Shafting Shattered My Whopper'.
Wouldn't it be scary if people in a country that isn't "backwards" or "uncivilised" (© Stephen Fry) like ours believed every silly thing they read about The Gays in the papers... bad or good.

Available on BBC iPlayer - who warn 'Contains upsetting scenes', and put it under a parental guidance lock!
Hold me now while I weep for the world...

Some famous rich gay men, pictured recently, with babies option

For its faults, Hollywood is a pretty accurate reflection of the way most of the world is looking... and the fact that they can have actors who are openly gay, openly camply gay, is not something you should thank and congratulate Hollywood for, you thank and congratulate the culture that Hollywood recognises, accepts things like that.
Hollywood is the thermometer that is thrust up the anus of the world's sensibility.
Things do move forward.
It's three steps forwards, two steps back, but in the end it is always progress, people learn.

Stephen Fry: Out There

In a new BBC Two series, Stephen Fry: Out There, Stephen travels across the globe to find out what it means to be gay. Visiting Uganda, America, Russia, Brazil and India, Stephen encounters some of the most notorious homophobes on the planet to try to understand the origin of their beliefs; he also meets victims of homophobic abuse.

The first episode sees Stephen’s journey start close to home as he meets Sir Elton John and David Furnish to talk about their experiences coming out, their civil partnership and decision to raise a child together. He also meets a young Iranian man seeking refuge in the UK as he faces the death penalty in his home country for being gay. [1]

Stephen then travels to Uganda - where the government is proposing a new law that would put gay people to death - and meets government ministers and religious leaders who support the bill. He sees the impact this proposed legislation is having on the lives of gay men and women, and has an emotional conversation with Stosh, a young gay woman who was a victim of 'corrective rape'.

Lastly, Stephen travels to America to explore the workings of Reparative Therapy, a therapy that claims to change people from gay to straight, and visits actor Neil Patrick Harris to talk about his experience of being openly gay in Hollywood.

Blurb from BBC Media Centre.

Episode one is on BBC 2 next Monday.
Stephen travels to Satan's own country, the Nazi apartheid gay gulag Russia, in episode two.

Might be a bit of a square-eye-opener for some to learn things are pretty crappy for gay people in other countries, too.

1. "Iranian newspapers and media outlets have published many accounts since the Iranian revolution in 1979 of executions for same-sex conduct. The overwhelming majority of those executed or on death row are males charged with sodomy, including juvenile offenders who were under 18 when they allegedly committed the act. The Iranian government maintains that most of these individuals have been charged for forcible sodomy or rape.

Because trials on moral charges in Iran are usually held in camera, it is difficult to determine what proportion of those charged and executed for same-sex conduct are LGBT and in what proportion the alleged offense was consensual. Because of the lack of transparency, Human Rights Watch said, it cannot be ruled out that Iran is sentencing sexual minorities who engage in consensual same-sex relations to death under the guise that they have committed forcible sodomy or rape." 

Human Rights Watch 2010.

The gay media when reporting these usually claimed all the men were executed "just for being gay".
This was usually, at best, unprovable.
As with Russia today, no evidence for stories about Uncle Sam's current bogeyman is needed.
Wonder what the "research" on Stephen Fry's series will be like?

"I can say Iran is a terrible state. I don’t need any evidence. I can say Ghaddaffi carries out terror. Suppose I try to say the US carries out terror, in fact it’s one of the leading terrorist states in the world. You can’t say that... People rightly want to know what do you mean. They’ve never heard that before. Then you have to explain. You have to give background. That’s exactly what’s cut out. Concision is a technique of propaganda. It ensures you cannot do anything except repeat clichés, the standard doctrine, or sound like a lunatic."

Noam Chomsky, interview 2012.