Floods: Farage Speaks Out!

Farage has actually said something even more stupid, and called for the UK foreign aid budget to be cut and the money given to those affected by the floods.

PS Seeing as they've just passed equal marriage shouldn't it be Scotland that's being flooded?
Or is the Envioronmental Agency's gay head honcho Lord Chris Smith to blame!!?
Just thank our vengeful Lord that Eric Pickles is so reassuringly heterosexual...

Letter Of The Day: The Guardian

Can we please see an end to the publication of hysterical, hypocritical and at times frankly racist protests about Russian treatment of LGBT people? Russia is not Nazi Germany and, given that an estimated 20 million Russian people died fighting nazism in the second world war, such comparisons are deeply offensive to the population of that country – whatever their sexuality. Gareth Edwards (Letters, 7 February) is the latest to draw comparison but, as far as I know, LGBT people in Russia are not barred from professional occupations, denied access to education, or expected to wear identifying stars on their clothing. Nor are they being detained in camps, whereas by 1936 the concentration camps were certainly in evidence – Sachsenhausen just outside Berlin was opened the same year.

No one condones anti-gay violence but it frequently happens here too, as last years Stonewall report clearly showed. Putin's law is clumsy and bigoted and, as has been pointed out, bears considerable similarity to the now defunct section 28 brought in by the Tory government of the 1980s. I do wonder how Messrs Fry et al would have reacted if the rest of the world had demanded boycotts of British cultural and sporting events through the 80s and 90s and likened our population to Nazis.

David Hodgetts
Burnley, Lancashire

The Guardian.

We cannot blame people for believing hyperbolic nonsense like this - it's basically all the straight and gay media has been telling them.

Stuart Hall: 1932-2014

"The least we can do is acknowledge our difference. Then we can start to talk."

The don of British cultural studies.

x

New Statesman online republishes a 2012 profile and interview.

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. 

Picture Of The Day: Kenyans For Ugandans

A masked Kenyan supporter of the LGBT community holds a condom as he joins others in protest against Uganda's anti-gay bill in front of the Ugandan High Commission in Nairobi, Kenya. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni is to decide before 16 February whether or not to enact the proposed anti-gay law, which would mean homosexuals in Uganda would face life imprisonment.

Pictures Of The Day, Telegraph. 

Tom Daley: A Few Notes Of Caution

1. This is in the Daily Star Sunday.
2. It quotes an "anonymous source".
3. The journalist has not got a spokesperson for Tom to comment.
4. Tom's boyfriend "gay activist" Dustin lance Black does not support Russian boycotts - he was at a gay film festival in St Petersburg in November.
5. Maybe an idea to wait and see what Tom or his people have to say.

PS I asked the journalist who wrote this, James Ingham (an occasional Fagburn reader!), about this on Twitter - no reply.

But our Tom is definitely the new "UK brand ambassador" for Adidas NEO! Exciting. *



* Adidas, sweatshops and 34p an hour wages - War On Want.

Edit: Though all the gay media can get angry about is you can't customise Adidas trainers with the word 'gay'. Fight the power!

Looking: Not Looking

These LA gayers are definitely 'Not Looking'.

A puckish satire of HBO's new gay show Looking, or as it's now known, Boring.

STI: A Perfect Storm

When The Independent meets David Stuart it is a perfect storm of hysterical nonsense.
Another "crisis"?!!
This man is the gay Chicken Licken.
Or is it David Icke?

USA: America, The Beautiful

In Alabama, schools must teach “homosexuality is not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public.”
Arizona prohibits any lessons that portray “homosexuality as a positive alternative lifestyle.”

And that's just the As.

USA! USA! USA!

Sochi Protest: A Photo-Essay

This is an American gay man. He is clearly very angry. He is angry about Russia.
He is shouting. Perhaps because he is in LA and Sochi is 7,000 miles away.
And cause everything in the USA is just A-OK.
He is so angry he has a placard where Putin looks like Hitler.
In America this passes for sophisticated political discourse.

When shall we three meet again?
This is a mass movement. Take that Putin!

Some workers show their enthusiasm for some silly middle-class people shouting.

USA! USA! USA!!!!!!!!!!!!
Russia BOO!

Daily Mail: Written On His Helmet

Remember - the Daily Mail really cares about gay rights and there is no sinister right-wing agenda behind this hysterical lie-fest.

No siree! Not on your nelly bum-bum!

PS Mad ex-Tory MP Louise Mensch lashes out at Putin in her Sun column.

"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 W Said.

Asylum: Another Country

Home Office officials are under fire for using "shockingly degrading" lines of questioning when interviewing gay and lesbian asylum seekers, despite clear guidance that such an approach is unacceptable.

A confidential Home Office document leaked to the Observer reveals how one bisexual asylum seeker was asked a series of lurid questions by a Home Office official, including: "Did you put your penis into x's backside?" and "When x was penetrating you, did you have an erection? Did x ejaculate inside you. Why did you use a condom?"

The document reveals that during five hours of questioning in a UK detention centre, the male asylum seeker was also asked: "What is it about men's backsides that attracts you?" and "What is it about the way men walk that turns you on?"

The Observer.

I guess this is why the Tories lecture Russia about gay rights and human rights, yes?
And how many are being deported back to say Uganda, Kenya, or indeed, Russia?

Russia: Me So Sad!

First they came for the banal clichés, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a banal cliché.

Then they came for the vacuous platitudes, and I did not speak out.

Because I was not a vacuous platitude.

Then they came for the wildly inappropriate metaphors, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a wildly inappropriate metaphor.

Then they came for the right-wing gay hysterics, and I did not speak out.
Because I was not a right-wing gay hysteric.

Then they came for the straight wet liberals, and I did not speak out.
Because I was not a straight wet liberal.

Then they came for the media lies, and I did not speak out

Because I was not a media lie.

Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak banal clichés for me.

Boo-hoo squish squish *sadface* etc.

Russia: Another Planet

Josie Long, The Guardian.
If you're short-sighted click on this. ^^^

PS Another posh gay, ida4, speaks out with some more terrible "street art" in Newcastle.

Take that Putin!

Upate: A protest against a branch of Donald's in Sunderland.

Russia: Mythbusting

The Winter Olympics in Sochi have given western journalists no end of fodder for outrage and absurdity – at the cost of accuracy. Despite the just concern about gay rights and entertaining tweets about Sochi’s half-built hotels, a number of persistent stories about Russia and its dissidents could use a little clearing up.

To that end, consider the following …

The Guardian - now read on...

Little parlour game; Ask why are the (gay) right, the (straight) wet liberals and the otherwise apolitical getting so agitated about Sochi?

Daily Mail: "Gay lobby"?

Russia: None More Gay

Odd that at the Opening Ceremony Cher said she'd refused to perform at, it was all people from the host country - as usually happens at these Olympic ceremony things, like in London 2012.
Not that I'm calling the mad cow a liar for saying she was asked to play.

Russia: More Patronising Shit From Ver Liberal Elite

Because only putting a rainbow-coloured letter in your corporate logo can set us free...

The Guardian.

Warning: Rather predictably this naff, unfunny fillum contains leading gaybores and nonsense-machines Stephen Fry and Saint Peter Tatchell.

New Statesman Twitter account.

Update: Why rainbows are taking over Twitter - Guardian Technology. ARGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Russia: At Last, An American Billionaire Speaks Out!

More emotional pornography.
More emotionally potent over-simplifications.
America good - they have gay marriage (in a few states).
But Russia BAD - they are anti-gay uncivilised backwards savages!
This video was made by the Russia Freedom Fund.
They want you to give them money.
It was set up by Jon Stryker, an American billionaire. 
Who quite likes (inherited) money.
But why's he asking for ours?

Russia: Gays Say Boo!

AmeriKKKa's ever reliable right-wing gay magazine, The Advocate.

One of just 11 stories about Sochi they posted today.

The Advocate used to say gay activism was a crazed left-wing plot.

See Edmund White, States Of Desire.

Thanks for defeating the Nazis, Russian communist dudes!

Gramsci: I Hate

I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent.

The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power. The mass ignores because it is careless and then it seems like it is the product of fate that runs over everything and everyone: the one who consents as well as the one who dissents; the one who knew as well as the one who didn’t know; the active as well as the indifferent. Some whimper piously, others curse obscenely, but nobody, or very few ask themselves: If I had tried to impose my will, would this have happened?

I also hate the indifferent because of that: because their whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me. I make each one liable: how they have tackled with the task that life has given and gives them every day, what have they done, and especially, what they have not done. And I feel I have the right to be inexorable and not squander my compassion, of not sharing my tears with them.

I am a partisan, I am alive, I feel the pulse of the activity of the future city that those on my side are building is alive in their conscience. And in it, the social chain does not rest on a few; nothing of what happens in it is a matter of luck, nor the product of fate, but the intelligent work of the citizens. Nobody in it is looking from the window of the sacrifice and the drain of a few. Alive, I am a partisan. That is why I hate the ones that don’t take sides, I hate the indifferent.

Machiavelli: True

"Politics is not about saying the truth, it's about being believed."

After writing this blog about gay men and the media for four years all I've learned is journalism is whatever you can get away with.

Harry Styles: Closet

No comment.

Nietzsche: The Bigger Lie

"What is the truth, but a lie agreed on?”

Years & Years: Real

Crap dancing, Ben

Russia: Rights

The Times.

I hope you're happy now
that...

the right really cares about gay rights
Again, the right really cares about gay rights
but only when it's useful to them, and it suits them
the right really cares about gay rights.

We got a Google Doodle
just to fool ya
that we really care.

Google bankrolls the far right ALEC.

Every click will give them money - gay pride!

How Fagburn hates the Independent's patronising point-missing gay coverage.