Fagburn: Silly Season

Despite the POLITICAL EARTHQUAKES!!! that have struck our leading parties we've now hit peak Silly Season, so Fagburn will be posting less for for a bit.

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International News: How Very Interesting

An advert featuring an image of Russian poet Alexander Pushkin and Kazakh composer Kurmangazy Sagyrbayuly kissing has sparked widespread complaint in Kazakhstan.

The poster – which features the two of the region’s most prominent 19th century cultural figures – is designed to promote a gay club in Almaty, one of the most liberal cities in Central Asia. The club, Studio 69, sits at the corner of streets named after Pushkin and Kurmangazy...

The Guardian.

A Chilean sailor has announced he is gay in an unprecedented public declaration that he hopes will bring change to the socially conservative South American country.

Mauricio Ruiz, 24, said he made the disclosure to dispel myths that gay people can't be effective members of Chile's armed forces...

The Independent.

August is the height of The Silly Season - that summer time when the amount of real news hits an annual low.

Though you might have noticed there's rather a lot of really awful and important things going on in the world right now (Private Eye have called it The Killy Season).

So how do newspapers pad out their pages? With trivia (Pregnant panda not pregnant), tittle-tattle (Non-entity in CBB meltdown), endless lists (11 Things You Already Knew About Kate Bush), pretending a nothing is 'a thing' (Legroom Rage!), nicking stuff off the internet (6 funniest tweets about #GBBO) etc etc etc...

Alternatively they just run gay-related wire stories, seemingly picked at random, that are of no real interest to their readers.

Poster for gay club in Kazakstahn is controversial!

Gay man in Chile comes out!

One is clearly a bad thing, the other is clearly a good thing.

But whilst I'd love to think this was a sign of how much The Guardian and The Independent want to tell people what's going down in the international LGBT community, it's not.

It's so lazy and patronising it suggests the exact opposite; they don't really care about us. 

Fagburn: Silly Season

'Pride Month' (© President Obama) may be over, but we're deep in the Silly Season now, so I'll be posting less frequently for a bit. x

Fagburn: No Homo News Day

Still hunting for something worth commenting on in today's papers and/or new media.
If there's nothing I'll see you tomorrow.
In the meantime here's an interview with Dan Savage on Salon.com, an interview with MediaLens on NLP about putting Hackgate in perspective, and Naomi Klein putting the riots in perspective in The Nation.
Enjoy!

• Image from Fashion Cats published by Vice Books. Out now!!!

Peter Mandelson: Can You Tell What It Is Yet?

You might think that as it's Silly Season it would be pretty much open season for the newspapers to fill their pages by printing even more nonsense about "the gays" than usual.
Not today, at any rate.
There's rather a lot about that chap with clear anger-management issues who blew his head off somewhere in the North, and lots about that footyball cup final thingy which is tonight, apparently.
As for anything remotely gay, "remotely" is the word; Grace Jones wore a funny hat at something or other, Cristiano Ronaldo has painted his toenails black, an 18 year-old boy wants to have a sex change so he can look more like Jordan (bless etc etc)...
Of course there is this big bubbling-under story/speculation about what Peter Mandelson is going to reveal in his steamy memoirs, which are being serialised in The Times next week.
These could be summarised as; no-one has the foggiest idea.
Fagburn was however rather taken with the Daley cartoon pictured above, from The Sunday Telegraph.
I like the way it hints at a Blair/Brown/Mandy bizarre psychic love triangle.
But moreover, it's so fantastically badly drawn that the cartoonist has had to caption it so people will realise it's meant to be Peter Mandelson.
A bit like those kids' drawings you see stuck to fridges, where Little Darren has scrawled madly in crayon on a bit of paper - and someone has helpfully added an arrow pointing to it and the caption "dog".
Bless.