On This Day: 21st August 1966

Stonewall gets all of the press. Lore has it that it is the very first time in modern history that the LGBT community physically fought back against police harassment. Lore is wrong.

Until some very recent development began to take hold in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, it has always been an impoverished neighborhood, home to the transient and the marginalized. Polk Street, between Ellis and California Streets, was the heart of the gay community in the 1960s. Turk Street, to the south and east, was home to the transgender/transsexual community. Because cross-dressing was illegal in San Francisco, gay bars often didn’t welcome transgender and transsexual people out of fear of being raided by police. What’s more, and because it was extremely difficult for transwomen to hold a job, many of them turned to prostitution and drugs. Rounding out the Turk Street population was a host of homeless LGBT youth, drag queens, prostitutes and hustlers.

At the corner of Taylor and Turk streets stood Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, a twenty-four hour restaurant and one of the few places that the people of Turk Street could go to get out of the weather and the violence on the street, and get a cheap meal or grab a cup of coffee between tricks. It was also the meeting place for Vanguard, a radical queer youth group established by Glide Memorial Methodist Church.

In the Spring of 1966, new management arrived at Compton’s, and they began to make life difficult for the hustlers, transwomen and homeless youth who spent a lot of time there but very little money. By summertime, Compton’s hired security guards and began calling the police to clear out the restaurant. Vanguard responded with a picket on July 18, but Compton’s policy of harassment and discrimination continued...

From the excellent Box Turtle Bulletin daily maiil-out.

Doritos: At Last The Rainbow-Coloured Crisps We've All Been Waiting For!

Gay Star News.

And you're also donating to It Gets Better - proudly fetishising gay teen suicide since 2010.

Stonewallers, you did not riot in vain.

Update: 'PepsiCo, who make Doritos (through subsidiary Frito-Lay), are producing a homosexual version of Doritos called "Rainbow Doritos." Doritos are a product marketed to children, so they make the perfect gateway snack to introduce children to the joys of homosexuality', American Thinker.

Pride In London: Different Times, Different Times...

New York Daily News, July 6 1969.

Once a riot, now just a PA opportunity for Sinitta's new single.
Yes, you heard right. SINITTA!

Still, exciting times...

Brighton Pride: Road Worthy

A "rainbow road crossing" has been unveiled in Brighton as part of the celebrations to mark LGBT Pride month.
The artwork, which stretches across the road at the artists' quarter of Madeira Drive, was painted over two days.
Similar crossings have previously appeared in cities around the world including Los Angeles, Sydney and Tel Aviv but this is thought to be the first in Europe.
The crossing was opened by Brighton artist and musician Heather Peace.
She called the artwork "a gift from me [!!!] to anyone that embraces diversity".
Although hundreds of tourists are expected to visit the artwork, police have warned it should not be considered an official road crossing.
Unlike official crossings, pedestrians will not have any priority over vehicles when walking on the artwork.
Traffic regulations also mean the artwork will have to be removed after a week.

BBC News.

Lesbians and gaylords, gay culture has now reached its zenith - its pinnacle, its apex, its apogee.

Queer liberation can literally go no further.

We might as well go back to the Stonewall Inn and start all over again.

PS Have an awful feeling this tomfoolery may be annoyingly close to Fagburn Mansions.

Going to have a look - if it is I'll ask the council to have it removed forthwith!

Update: It's a few minutes away - ugh!
'Artisans' quarter', my arse.
Thankfully, it's so far out and approaches a dead end, so hardly anyone will see it, bar coach drivers parking for the day and gentlemen on their way to The Bushes.

Update2: Oh crap. Looks like London's getting one. Says much that it's been proposed by a Tory MP, Mike Freer. Ooh, thank you!

Edit: For one day only! 

Facebook Pride: Adorable!

The Advocate.

I bet all the angry queers who rioted at Stonewall didn't dare dream we'd see such an epoch-making - and ADORABLE - day!

Facebook - putting the PR back into Pride.

'How little pleasure most people need to make them find life good, how modest man is!' Nietzsche.

Number of search results for 'adorable' on The Advocate website - 502.

On Queerty - 579.

On Gay Star News - 114, but they ain't been going long.*

And yes, they're usually barftastic sentimental stories involving marriage or kids or both.

Any gay journalist who files a story about something 'adorable' deserves to have their hands drop off.

* Couldn't get Pink News' search engine to work, Towleroad had over 5000 (!) but that included readers' comments. I could have also done searches for things 'that will warm your heart!' but was worried about choking on my own vomit.

Fagburn: My Part In The Stonewall Riots

Good evening, Mr Fagburn.
'Good evening to you.'
Now, you are here today to tell us about how you started the Stonewall riots.
'Yes, I did.'
Was anyone else involved?
'Only Saint Peter of Tatchell as far as I can recall.'
Well done to you both - I have but one further question, everyone now says they were at the Stonewall riots.
'Your point being?'
You are making this up.
'Oops. Rumbled.'

Fagburn: I Read The News Today, Oh Boy...

Today, there is no real gay news worth commenting on, so here is a HEART-WARMING and ADORABLE photo of two rich gayers with designer babies getting gaymarried from The Guardian - cause sentimental crap makes the virtual world go round.
How the felch did we get from rioting outside Stonewall to here?
I give up!

Barilla Pasta Outrage: First They Came For The Lasagna...

The chairman of Barilla Group says his company will not feature gay families in advertisements for his products because he likes the "traditional" family. If someone disagrees, well, they can go "eat another brand of pasta."

Guido Barilla made the anti-gay comments during an interview with La Zanzara on Radio24 Wednesday. The radio host asked him why his company does not have ads with gay families.
"We have a slightly different culture," Barilla said, per a Huffington Post translation of the interview. "For us, the 'sacral family' remains one of the company’s core values. Our family is a traditional family. If gays like our pasta and our advertisings, they will eat our pasta; if they don’t like that, they will eat someone else’s pasta. You can’t always please everyone not to displease anyone. I would not do a commercial with a homosexual family, not for lack of respect toward homosexuals – who have the right to do whatever they want without disturbing others – but because I don’t agree with them*, and I think we want to talk to traditional families. The women are crucial in this." 

Activists are now demanding a boycott against Barilla, which is the world's largest pasta producer, according to Italy's Gazzetta del Sud. The protest became a trending topic on Twitter shortly after Barilla's remarks aired, with the hashtag #boicottabarilla. 

From Huffpost Gay Voices - the online home of boring bourgeois gay hysteria.

SHOCKING!
Naturally the united gay simpletons of Twitter have set it ablaze today.
Fuck knows how anyone who can get angry about something like this would cope if something really bad happened.
So a silly old man has said the sort of silly thing some silly old men sometimes say!
THIS IS EXACTLY HOW MUSSOLINI STARTED!!!
Is there an e-petition yet?
Has Dan Savage ordered us to boycott French red wine in protest?
Can someone knock up a poster of Il Duce Barilla with a Hitler moustache drawn on?
Should we be visiting our delightful Tuscan holiday homes in the near future?
Later this evening Fagburn will be protesting by pouring a tin of spaghetti hoops down the drain and then sending a photo of him doing it to the world's gay media.
Silence anyone you disagree with!
If you don't like what Guido has said buy another brand of pasta, that'll learn him, even though he said that's what he thinks you should do.
In fact, don't buy anything unless you've seen a gay dude in one of their adverts.
It's time to make a stand against these fascists who aren't very keen on having gayers in one of their crappy TV ads.
The revolutionary spirit of the Stonewall riots lives on.
¡No pastarán!

• Commercial Coset - an online compendium of LGBT-themed commercials from around the world. 
* NB This doesn't make sense. No idea if it's him or the translation.

Update: Actual - and non-ironic - Gay Star News' headline; 'Gay Hate Spaghetti'...

Update2: At last someone talking some sense, Barilla Chairman Doesn't Like Gay People: So What? J Bryan Lowder on Slate (though GB didn't actually say he didn't like gay people).
Good on the gay "movement"'s fetishisation of consumer boycotts (and corporate endorsements).

Readers' comments on gay sites are hilariously hysterical, predictably.

My favourite from The Advocate; "I had a few boxes in my pantry this morning. No longer."

Take that, pasta Nazis!

PS Some more brilliant reader comments by les enragés at The Advocate...

Pride: Start Here

First Gay Marches to Commemorate Stonewall: 1970.

The actual Stonewall uprising received scant attention in the media. There were very few reporters there and only a bare handful of photos taken of the uprising as it occurred. But in the space of a year, Stonewall had already become a single word that meant more than just a run-down bar in the Village. Gay people across the country took June 28 as their own Independence Day with commemorative marches taking place in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and, of course, New York. The day was celebrated as “Christopher Street Liberation Day” for several years before Pride took over. (The day is still called CSD, or Christopher Street Day, in Germany.) One of the more interesting articles to appear in the mainstream media for those first Christopher Street Liberation Day marches was a brief description of the parade up Christopher Street itself on June 28, 1970 that appeared in July 11 edition of The New Yorker:

A number of policemen were standing around, looking benevolent and keeping an eye on things. Many of the marchers were carrying banners that identified them as members of homosexual organizations, like the Gay Liberation Front, the Mattachine Society, and the Gay Activists Alliance. The symbol of the G.A.A. is a lambda, which physicists use as a symbol for wavelength, and many of the kids were wearing purple T-shirts with yellow lambdas on them.

Most of the marchers chatted in anticipatory tones, and a few reporters were among them looking for interviews. One approached two boys standing together and asked them the question that reporters always ask: “How do you feel?”

One of the boys said, “I feel proud.”

At the head of the parade, one boy stood carrying the American flag. Near him stood a man talking to another man. “Homosexuals are very silly,” said the first man. “They congregate in certain areas and then spend all other time walking up and down the street ignoring each other.”

While “Pride” was still several years ago, you can already see that “pride” was already the operative word for the day. The author (whose name is not given) reported that marchers carried signs reading “Homosexual is not a four letter word,” “Latent Homosexuals Unite!” and “Hi Mom!” Anti-gay protesters were there as well, one with a sign reading simply “Sodom + Gomorrah.” But despite a few sour notes, the parade was more than just a success: it was cathartic for some:

An eighteen-year-old boy from Long Island who was marching in the middle of the parade with his arms around two friends said, “I’ve been up since six-thirty, I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. I wasn’t going to come, but then I figured I’m gay and I might as well support my people. So here I is!” Sometimes the marchers addressed the onlookers. “Join us!” they called, and “Come on in, the water’s fine!” They got a few grins for this, and once or twice somebody did step out from the crowd to join the parade. These people were roundly cheered by the marchers. Just south of Central Park, a well-dressed middle-aged woman on the sidewalk flashed a V-sign. A marcher, a young man with a mustache, shouted to a cop, also a young man with a mustache, “It isn’t so bad, is it?” The cop shouted back, “No!”

As the parade entered the Park, a young marcher said, “Would you believe it! It looks like an invading army. It’s a gay Woodstock. And after all those years I spent in psychotherapy!”

A friend of his laughed and said, “What will your shrink do without you? He’s dependent on you for the payments on his car.”

Via the ever excellent and informative Box Turtle Bulletin.

Update: Nice collection of photos from early US prides on, err, Mail Online, with patronising right-on captions that read like they were written for a student magazine.
As ever, some great readers' comments; "Sin on parade... disgusting." etc.

Stonewall: Riot, Girls!!!

Oh, nearly forgot, today is the anniversary of the first day of the Stonewall Riots.
And don't you forget, these riots couldn't have happened without their proud sponsors, Absolut Vodka, Barclays Bank, Claire's Accessories, Coors Beer, Monsanto, Rio Tinto Zinc, and the entire US Marine Corps.

Remembering Stonewall - a stunning, haunting radio documentary.
The events have been much mythologised and mistold - it's like the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club, now everyone claims they were there - but I think this gets closest to the truth.
There are some brief video interviews with Stonewall veterans here.
The 1984 documentary Before Stonewall: The Making Of A Gay And Lesbian Community can be watched here.
"Happy Pride!" as actually no-one but Boris Johnson says.

Edit: It has been brought to Fagburn's attention that "Happy Pride!" is now something of a "thing" among the insincere online community.
It is a meme. Or a trope. One or the other. I've never quite figured out what they mean.
I stand corrected.
So, happy fatuous cliché!

Stonewall 1969: Cartoon Time!

Mike Funk's cartoon book about the Stonewall riots - on his Flickr page.

It's only 16 pages long, but Mike still manages to point to some of the controversies; about ownership of the legend/myth, who went to the inn, who was there that night, who started it, and the fact that one of the most quoted "participants" may not have actually been there...

Google Pride: It's The Least We Could Do

Pink News gets even more excited about Google doing a stupid rainbow Doodle to celebrate gay pride that only shows up if you type in some LGBT searchwords.

Which slightly defeats the whole point of Pride, one might think.
But look at that baby - isn't it AMAZING?
It's surely of half-hearted tokenistic corporate PR crapola like this that our gay brothers and sisters dreamed of while rioting outside the Stonewall Inn on those balmy hot summer nights back in June 69.
And - right here, right now - it feels so good to be constantly reminded - post-Snowden - that Google are keeping tabs on me and hopefully filing them for whenever the US national security state wants my personal details handed over.
HUZZAH!

PS I don't mean to keep singling out Pink News, it's just Gay Star News won't realise Google have done this for a few days.

Update: The PN PR-driven idiocy goes on. Celebrate how much megacorps know about you. Yay!

Hit Factory Live: Dead!

And the cancellation had nothing to do with piss-poor ticket sales, obvs.
Every single possible puntastic gag has already been wrung out of this on Twitter.
All I'll say is that so many queens are so angry and upset about this, it could end up like the day they buried Judy Garland - if you know what I mean...

• Thanks to Darren for the poignant photo.

Nobody Turns Up To Pointless Stupid Protest: Whitney Blamed

About four people turned up for "a mass kiss-in" in Trafalgar Square yesterday protesting anti-gay laws in Commonwealth countries.
Was it cause it was an ill-thought out pointless exercise in self-aggrandising wankery?
Hell no!

'Dr Patrick Williams, chairman of Pride London, said while several people had turned out, it was not as many as hoped, which was to be expected after the sudden death of Whitney Houston, who he called "one of the world's greatest gay icons".
'He said: "I wouldn't say it's disappointing - the weather being what it is, and the sudden demise of one of the world's biggest gay icons, Whitney Houston.
"A lot of us have grown up with her music so that was a bit of a shock. As soon as I heard, I realised we were going to have problems with people coming.'

The Times.

She wasn't a "gay icon", you hopeless fuckwit.
And even if she was, it didn't stop the Stonewall Riots, did it?

Stonewall Riots: Riot Grrls!

Today is the anniversary of the first Stonewall Riots in New York.
Please don't stop rioting, girls.

Caitlin Moran: The First Gay Man On The Moon

"Last week I was compiling a quick-cut YouTube montage of humanity’s greatest moments – what can I say? The kids are 7 and 9 now; weekend activities have moved on from cupcakes and colouring in – and came across an awkward fact: there is no Gay Moon Landing.
"There are single, iconic images for every other blockbuster moment in humanity’s progress: the civil rights movement has Martin Luther King, giving his speech. The suffragette movement has Emily Wilding Davison, trampled by the King’s horse. The triumphs of medical science: the mouse with the ear on its back. And the space race has, of course, the moon landing – Neil Armstrong making the most expensive footprint in history.
"But there is no single, iconic news image for gay rights. There’s no five-second clip you can put in that marks a moment where things started getting better for the LGBT guys. The Stonewall riots in 1969 are an obvious turning point, of course – but footage of it needs captions to explain what’s going on. Otherwise, it just looks like a lot of late-Sixties men of above-average grooming experiencing a very unwelcome fire evacuation from a disco, while a load of policemen hit them. Anyone who went clubbing in the rougher parts of the Midlands, or Essex, at the time will have seen scenes almost identical. It’s not particularly gay..."

Caitlin Moran in The Times. Continues below...

Rage: The 1981 Toronto Bathhouse Riots

"On Feb 5, 1981, 30 years ago, more than 150 Toronto police descended on that city’s gay bathhouses, arresting more than 300 innocent men. It was part of a deliberate and organized campaign by government and police to push gay baths and bars out of business, to silence the gay press and to remove gay voices from public discourse.
"Gay people had, of course, previously fought police harassment, but the events in Toronto in the first half of 1981 were watershed for the liberation movement in Canada. The activist chops refined then equipped gay people across the country to fight censorship, win partnership and employment rights, demand reasonable treatment from government, face HIV/AIDS, fight homophobic violence and win marriage rights..."

Xtra! magazine assembles a fascinating archive of articles, photos, audio and video clips to mark the 30th anniversary of the Toronto Bathhouse Riots - Canada's Stonewall

The Christmas Lecture: "Get A Time Machine..."

There's a very interesting essay on Richard Dawkins website about change and how we make it.
And boy, does Fagburn love anything to do with the mighty Richard Dawkins.

The Gays Are Winning – And the Religious Right is Losing: What Nontheists Can Learn from the Success of the Homosexual Rights Movement
By Gregory S Paul

"The gays are winning. The culture war. The same culture war that religion is losing. Do not think that the gains of the former are not connected to the loses of the latter. Do realize that atheism is the friend of gay rights in a way that religion can never be, and that the gay cause is to the benefit of secularism. And that the rise in the fortunes of gays has important lessons for the atheist cause.
"When I pointed out that the gays are winning a couple of yearsat OpEdNews it did not seem as obvious what with the laws and amendments banning same sex marriage. And hate crimes against homosexuals continue. But the opening of the U.S. military to the service of out of the closet gays for the first time in the nation’s history, the lopsided Senate vote to that effect with major Republican support, and the large majority popular support for the historic change is making the success of the same-sex crowd undeniable. But to get an even better appreciation of how far gays have come let’s conduct a thought experiment.
"Get a time machine. Go back to, say, 1958. Destination, any well-populated place in America will serve our purposes. Stand on a heavily traveled sidewalk with a clipboard and pencil and pretend you are doing a survey. Ask folks as they pass by if they think gays, err, homosexuals, will ever be able to get married. Or serve without discrimination in the Army. Here's what will happen. Chances are fair you will get beat up, especially if you are in the south. After all, they are still into lynching the occasional black. Even if you don't get assaulted, people will look at you like you are insane. What's that? Homos carrying guns in the Marines. Getting married? Who could be crazy enough to imagine such a thing? What are you, some sort of pervert? Perhaps a faggot red (back when red meant pinko)? Who did you say you're taking this survey for? Get back on the time machine, quickly. Move forward in time to, say, 1988. Do the same thing. Chances that you'll get beat up will be far less. And remember to say gay, not homosexual. But the ultimate response will be similar. Gays, getting married? Say what..."

Now read on...

Happy Christmas.

Out 100: Out Demons Out!

A royal wedding in the offing, The Beatles on iTunes and Children On Need on Friday - truly these are wonderful times to be a fuckwit.
The rest of us must somehow struggle on.
I haven't found anything to write about in today's papers yet, so here's a photo I like of Chris Colfer from the new Out 100; the US magazine's annual list of the top 100 gaylebrities who they wanted to take photos of who returned their calls.
Enjoy!

• The photograph above is part of a Stonewall riots themed session. Mr Colfer's own views on Judy Garland are not known.