BrewDog No Label: Tastes Like Pinkwashing

A company has created what it claims is the world’s first “transgender” beer – using hops that have changed sex from male to female.

Scottish brewing company Brewdog launched the new product, No Label – which it claims “captures the spirit of Soho itself”.

Brewdog explained: “No Label is the world’s first ‘non-binary, transgender beer’ designed to reflect the diversity of the area and champion inclusivity.

“This 4.6% ABV Kölsch has been brewed with hops that have changed sex from female to male flowers prior to harvest.

“We have used these to emphasise that, just like humans, beer can be whatever the hell it wants to be, and proud of it.” ...

“The beer draws parallels with individuals who identify themselves in a similar ‘non-binary’ way, as neither exclusively male nor female – a community of people that is still largely under-acknowledged by society...

Profits from the beer will be donated to queer event collective Queerest of the Queer, in turn to support trans communities.

Pink News.

It really is baffling that Queerest of the Queer would not only be involved with this, but open their post on it by decrying pinkwashing.

— How Upsetting (@How_Upsetting) November 5, 2015

Queerest of the Queer aren't the people you call when you want to pink wash - we don't give you easy credits on your corporate social responsibility - we're a collection of politically minded queers into performance and creating queer spaces.

So when BrewDog responded to our challenge to talk about their fundraising video and how they could seriously re-engage with and make amends to the LGBTQ+ community they weren't taking the easy track.

We met and started to talk about levels of oppression and how Cis, White, Rich, Gay men are not the only voice, even if they are a loud voice. There are other lived experiences. We had long animated discussions, including how charitable money doesn't often end up going to the grass roots organisations that help LGBTQ+ youth, especially when they are supporting the homeless and refugees.

Then we got talking about the history of brewing, the role of women in early brewing that was slowly erased, and the work Brew Dog are doing, and should continue to do, to bring more diversity into brewing.

This led us to talking about the closure of queer spaces, with the closure of the Black Cap, Madame JoJo’s and the George and Dragon to mention but a few.

  

So we ended up where we are today, with No Label - a beer with our name on it. A beer without anybody’s name on it. A beer, as it were, without a name.

All money from this venture is gong to charities - because one of the goals of Queerest of the Queer was that we give as much of any profit we can to charity. We didn’t make a profit from the festival in September- and this allowed us to do more than we could have done even if we had a capacity crowd.

Money is going to the Albert Kennedy Trust, Micro Rainbow who support LGBT asylum seekers, and we are working with Mosaic Youth and other youth charities to run a LGBTQ+ youth ball in the new year.

We haven’t put a label on what this relationship with BrewDog is – it would be counter-intuitive...

Facebook post - please read the comments.

Pink News.

Last September, BrewDog released a crowdfunding video that showed founders James Watt and Martin Dickie sending up how desperate they were for money by dressing in bad drag and trying to sell their bodies in a brothel window, under the hashtag #dontmakeusdothis.

This was greeted with a (slightly OTT) online petition and a call for a boycott until the 'transphobic' online ad was withdrawn.

BrewDog beer company claims to be "beer for punks". They claim to be ethical. Yet in their new crowdsourcing video they mock homeless people, trans women and sex workers. They say, "don't make us do this" whilst performing as offensive caricatures of people, many of whom already suffer discrimination every day. They are mocking the lives and experiences of people who real punks would be defending and helping.

Worse, this is a fundraising video - they're using these images in an exploitative manner to make money.

In February 2014, BrewDog came up with this wanky PR stunt to jump on the hysterical Sochi bandwagon; ‘Hello My Name is Vladimir’ has been launched as the world’s first protest beer, aimed to mock and criticise Russia’s anti-gay “propaganda” laws.

Take that Putin!

Full disclosure: Fagburn completely missed this one, I ignore a lot of these tedious pink PR exercises as I don't like giving them the oxygen of publicity.

I had no idea how farcical this one was - thanks to @How_Upsetting for joining the dots. x

See also Why Drinking 'Transgender Beer' Won't Help The LGBT Community, Anthony Lorenzo, Vice.

PS Should point out that Fagburn does not think the BrewDog dudes are devils, and probably had good intentions.

Look at this for an example of classic bourgeois LGBTIQWXYZ victimhood!

Sorry?

Where was the 'HARM DONE'! by their crappy ad?

Sake.

Tweet Of The Day: Gus Kenworthy

I am gay. pic.twitter.com/086ayvChq2

— Gus Kenworthy (@guskenworthy) October 22, 2015

No, I've never heard of him - or indeed, even of his sport, something called 'freeskiing' * - either, but well done, you are #sobrave etc.

* 'Freeskiing, or new school skiing is a specific type of skiing, which involves tricks, jumps, and terrain park features, such as rails, boxes, jibs, or other obstacles', apparently.

Sochi: World Now Changed Forever!

The ever hopeless Gay Star News.

Sorry, can't find the bit where we learn what has actually changed gay rights - and the world - FOREVER!!.

Despite such valiant and well-thought out 'actions' as Tilda Swinton taking a selfie while waving a rainbow flag in Red Square, Dame Michael Cashman cutting up his credit card, and some gay venues saying they were boycotting Russian (or non Russian?) vodkas they weren't selling anyway.

Unless you mean it shows how much the gay movement has now become so depoliticised it is only capable of silly self-satisfying stunts that serve power?

Johnny Weir: To Russia With Love

In the media frenzy leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, LGBT athletes and activists must choose whether to risk their own safety by speaking out against Russia's anti-gay laws. Cameras follow the experiences of outspoken figure skater and commentator Johnny Weir, tennis legend and official U.S. Olympic delegate Billie Jean King, as well as several openly gay Olympic hopefuls and Russian LBGT activists.

You can watch it here - Fagburn has no idea what it's like.

PS Unfortunately EPIX is only available in the United States and its territories.

Update: 'I wanted to have more of a complicated perspective on Russia from a gay sports celebrity who loves Russia and didn’t think of Russia in terms of binaries, like ‘Russia = bad for gays’ and leave it at that,” director and activist Noam Gonick on the Daily Beast.

AMERICAN GAYS NOT LIKE COMPLICATED! MUST BOMB RUSSIA! BURN JOHNNY WEIR! UGG! 

Lewis Hamilton: Dreaming Of Russian Prix

Best of luck to our Lewis in the F1 Russian Grand Prix today.

x

PS It's being held in that Sochi. BOO! etc

Exciting The Sports News Update: Apparently she has won that driving that fast car faster than the other men driving fast cars thing!

I bet they'll all be queuing up to touch your helmet tonight!

Take that Putin!

Tom Daley: Getting Back To Russia

“I have no concerns whatsoever about going to Russia. I’ve been there five, six times before and never had any problems. You go there to dive, you don’t go there thinking about doing anything other than that.

“For me, I wouldn’t go there thinking: ‘Oh, I’m going to do this,’ or: ‘I have to do this.’ I just go there and focus on my performance.”

Tom Daley at the Leaders In Sport conference, when asked about competing in the World Aquatic Championships in Kazan next year, The Guardian.

Well said, Tom - and well done for not being taken in by the hysterical propaganda campaign by the gay right in service to US empire.

PS Pink News have run this story forgetting that earlier this year they told readers Tom was boycotting Russsia.

Their source? The Daily Star On Sunday, who ran a news item quoting our old friend 'an anonymous source' ie they clearly made it up. * #gayjournalism

Their well-informed readers are FEWMING with our Tom.

Despite no LGBT Russian campaigners that I can recall asking for a boycott of Russia, these brainiacs are all for it.

Wonder how long it'll be before someone compares Tom to Hitler?

Tick tick tick...

* A trick they repeated this week with an unquestioning regurgitation of the Mail's Grindr at Buckingham Palace nonsense. The Star ran a front page story last week on The Plague Of Black Eyed Ghost Children. Presumably Pink News also accepts this as fact?

Foreign Affairs: Barbarism Begins At Home

Michael Rosen.

Legs akimbo for teh gays.

Gay Star News.

The Guardian. *

In an age where every US/UK imperial war is justified as a 'humanitarian intervention', a good guide to who are our current bogeymen is when the media suddenly start writing about their human rights abuses.

These days, that often means saying; 'THESE MONSTERS DON'T LIKE THE GAYS!'

'SEND IN THE DRONES! SEND IN NATO!'

Ten years ago it was all about telling fairy stories about horror stories in Iran, last year it was those evil Russians.

This is the flipside of Pinkwashing, where we are expected to look kindly on Israel's persecution of the Palestinian people because Tel Aviv is a super-duper sexy place for a gay holiday. 

Shall we call it Pinkblooding?

"Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate." Edward Said.

See also David Cameron And The Cynicism Of Comparing Putin To Hitler, Owen Jones for Guardian online today. 

Hardly an original thought but that's Owen for you.

You may recall in the run-up to the Sochi Winter Olympics it became a commonplace to read hysterical comparisons of Putin to Hitler, and to say what was happening to gay people in Russia was just like what happened to Jewish people in Nazi Germany. You may have noticed things didn't turn out to be quite so bad for gay people in Russia. Fagburn has still not seen one revocation of this textbook gay hysteria.

* Note that the English language source for this is Radio Free Europe, the US government-funded radio station, Cold War relic and propaganda machine. I'm not saying that means Aksyonov didn't say this, just that RFE will be more than aware of this story's uses.

Commonwealth Games: Hoots Mon Etc!

Tasteful and totally appropriate caption from Huffington Post, there. 

PANTO star John Barrowman left a global telly audience of over a billion [Yeah, right] gobsmacked — when he snogged a fella at last night’s Commonwealth Games opening ceremony.

The gay kiss was part of a barmy sequence that saw Susan Boyle fluff her song words, a dancer in undies grab his crotch and performers frolick inside giant Tunnock’s teacakes...

The Sun.

The Gretna Green kiss was quite cute, and I like seeing the ceremony as a low budget campy piss-take of the London Olympics extravaganza, though that may only be in my head.

The ever fatuous Gay Star News.

Not sure how this kiss would be a 'stunning rebuke' to anti-gay politicians and religious leaders who argue that homosexuality and the tolerance of it are a Western malaise we are trying to export, but there you go.

Expect the usual suspects to get incredibly over-excited about this - 'A brief gay kiss! Take that Third Worlders!' - like the walls of Jericho will now fall.

Funny how the gayers who are the most easily offended are also the most easily pleased.

Even the Mail approve - go figure.

Lush Cosmetics: Special Sochi Winter Olympics Closing Ceremony (PR) Campaign

After Lush asked people to draw a Nazi pink triangle on themselves 'using pink lipstick', in support of gay rights, bafflingly, then take a picture and tweet it to their shitty #signoflove, Fagburn asked if they could end the games with a SIGN OF LOVE!

RT! OR DON'T YOU CARE!!???

Thanks to Esteemed Comrade Darren. x

Thought For The Day: Anton Krasovsky

"It's a very difficult question," said Anton Krasovsky, a gay television presenter who lost his job after coming out live on air. In a column in the Guardian last May, he wrote that the time for gay people to become courageous and stand up for their rights had come. Now, though, he said it was hard to evaluate whether the huge international pressure had helped.

"I think any kind of hysteria is bad," he said. "Putin is not Hitler. Sochi is not Berlin 1936. When I read the calls for boycotting the Olympics I was absolutely disgusted."

Quoted in The Guardian who also visit Sochi's gay club Mayak.

Owner Andrei Tanichev,tells them; "It's a complex question, whether or not all the noise in the west about the issue has been good or bad. On the one hand, it is very good that it has forced people in Russia to think about gay rights properly. On the other hand, I think the level of noise has been greater than the size of the problem."

Still what would they know, they're only gay Russians?

PS The Independent On Sunday also sampled the gay scene in Sochi - which they claim is "Russia's gay capital."

PPS And the Daily Telegraph!! "It's Russia's Brighton."

PPS Today's Times also goes to Club Mayak! The place must be rammed right now.

PPPS As does USA Today!!! "It's a bit  fake, all this attention," a patron tells them, ironically. 

Today's Sochi Balls: Take That Putin!

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- The Dutch brass band that always performs at Olympic speed skating ovals is considering playing a popular gay song -- "Y.M.C.A." -- at the Sochi Winter Olympics to show its support for gay rights.

It remains to be seen how Russian and Olympic authorities would react should the Kleintje Pils band play a song widely considered to be a gay anthem. A ban on information about "nontraditional sexual relations" signed into law by Russian President Vladimir Putin has provoked widespread international outrage from critics who believe it discriminates against gays.

Band leader Ruud Bakker told The Associated Press on Tuesday that Kleintje Pils could mix the Village People's "Y.M.C.A." in its sing-along repertoire as "a signal." But he added that the band didn't want to antagonize organizers or turn its performances into a "political game."

"We will see if we can get one or two songs into the selection, knowing that in the Netherlands it will be seen as a signal we are thinking of them (gays)," Bakker said...

This idiocy knows no bounds.

Peter Tatchell And The Independent: The Big Questions

The Independent.

"Let's do a thing about the gays, to show we love the gays."
"Who should we ask?"
"It's usually Peter Tatchell, isn't it? He'll do anything, and I can't think of any other gays."
"Okay, that's The Independent's gay stuff done for this year."
"Pub?"
"Straight posh pub?"
"Straight posh pub."

Russia: New Video About The Anti-Gay Worse-Than-Apartheid Nazi Regime!!!

Queer Nation have made a video, The Road To Sochi!
That's right "Queer Nation"; a group of Americans who only ever protest about bad stuff happening in another nation, RUSSIA!
Cause everything's just fine and dandy for queers in the land of the free, yeah?
Who cares about shit going down in your own backyard that you could actually change?
Well, this is a far better use of your time and energy!
USA! USA! USA! etc etc. 
Not sure quite what the point is with this video.
But apparently us TEH GAYZ should ask multinational corporations to act like moral agents.
Like NBC, Coca-Cola, McDonalds, GE, Dow and ATOS!
ATOS!!?
Then they'll ask President Putin to play nice.
Cause that's how politics works.
Only American big business can save us gays from the evil Russian hordes!
Let's have another boycott!
Who says the gay movement has been hijacked by right-wing ideology?

Queer Nation Manifesto: Worship corporations as the new masters of the universe and remember you are no more than a gay consumer, so your only "power" is to say you'll buy your stuff off someone else - and only get angry about shit that's happening to queers in other countries, but only those ones that disobey American empire. Then everything will be okay forever and you will be a good Queer Nationalist.

Queer Nation serve imperialism!
The moronification of LGBT campaigning is now complete.
You can all go back to your loved ones, gayhusbands and families now...

Keep up-to-date with all the latest hysterical and in-no-way made-up stories enchanting and obsessing the US gay right with AmericaBlog's dedicated site, Russian Gays. 
Because being a gay journalist means never having to check a story about Russia...

PS The politically braindead Gay Star News reports excitedly, Corporate World Getting Ready To Boycott Gay Hate Countries.
You really could not make this shit up!

Sochi: Powerless

After repeated requests for "assurances" that Russia's newly enacted ban on so-called homosexual propaganda won't affect the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the International Olympic Committee today announced that it is "completely satisfied" with vague promises from Russian diplomats that LGBT athletes and spectators will be safe during the Winter Games. 

"The Olympic Charter states that all segregation is completely prohibited, whether it be on the grounds of race, religion, color, or other, on the Olympic territory," said Jean-Claude Killy, chairman of the IOC Coordination Commission, at a press conference in Sochi today, according to the Associated Press. 

"That will be the case, we are convinced," continued Killy in French, according to a translation from the AP. "Another thing I must add: The IOC doesn't really have the right to discuss the laws in the country where the Olympic Games are organized. As long as the Olympic Charter is respected, we are satisfied, and that is the case."

The Advocate et al.

Erm, but this only applies to the Olympic games and sport, the Olympic Charter already bans all protests.

“No kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas.” Section 50:3.

You may recall Tommie Smith and John Carlos being expelled from the Mexico 68 Olympics for giving black power salutes.
Would someone like to make a list of countries that don’t have any discriminatory laws, and would thus be suitable hosts in the future?
I can't imagine it would take very long.

Update - quoted in Pink News, Friday...

On Friday, Sergei Nikitin, Amnesty International’s Moscow Office director, said: “Russia’s law banning propaganda of ‘non-traditional sexual relations’ among minors is clearly discriminatory and in this it violates international law and runs counter to the Olympic Charter. Moreover, the introduction of the law creates an atmosphere in Russia that has already encouraged brutal crimes against people only because of their real or perceived sexual orientation.”
He added: “The fact that the IOC has satisfied itself with Russian officials’ assurances of non-discrimination is not enough. It disregards the fact that Russian law effectively prohibits people from public expression of ‘non-traditional’ sexual orientation.”

This is all utter, utter BALLS - every sentence here can be answered with "No, it doesn't."
Give me (Olympian) strength.