General Election 2015: A Small Red/Green Dot

Freedom for the St James's Street bit of Kemptown!

Update: Come join the People's Republic Of Brighton & Hove.

Victory Day: Thank You Russia!

For the final defeat of fascism in Europe, and the sacrifice of 25 million Russian lives in the Great Patriotic War.

We will never forget.
x

Update: We should never forget - the Soviets won Would War II in Europe. Independent On Sunday.

The Sauna: Working Title

CS2.

Update: This was meant to be shown in May - now cleverly called The Gay Sauna - not sure it was....

General Election 2015: The Morning After

By 'all', I don't mean the 75% of people who didn't vote for a right-wing cunt, obvs.

General Election 2015: Closure

Fagburn has voted, and in keeping with generally agreed media standards will now cease any commentary until the ballot stations close.*

* Unless something really interesting happens.

General Election 2015: It's Here!

Like many people, Fagburn only found out yesterday that there was a ban on taking selfies inside a polling station.

Which prompted the obvious question; what kind of a wanker would take a selfie at a polling station?

Well, today we have an answer!

Small print: This wasn't tweeted 6 hours from the time on this blogpost, I've just posted it closer to the time when he did. 

General Election 2015: Never Mind The Ballots...

THIS is clearly the most important thing happening in the UK right now!

Nigel Farage: It's The Way He Tells 'Em

Naughty Nigel enjoying a nice fag.

Nigel Farage was last night accused of homophobia after footage emerged of him making a joke about ‘fags’ in a best man speech.

The Ukip leader’s final hours of election campaigning were overshadowed by the release of the video of his brother’s wedding.

The singer Rod Stewart, who was a guest at the July 2001 wedding, appeared visibly uncomfortable after Mr Farage used the word ‘fags’ as part of a joke about the death of a man at Michael Barrymore’s house, which happened months earlier.

Mr Farage yesterday pulled out of a planned visit to a bingo hall shortly after he was contacted by the Mail about the film.

He claimed that he had intended ‘no malice’ with the joke, but did not apologise...

Mr Farage, who appears much younger in the video with a full head of black hair, says that he would like to start the speech with some ‘housekeeping’.

He said: ‘As far as smokers here are concerned there’s good news and bad news for you. The bad news was we were not allowed to smoke until the coffee was served.

‘But the good news for us who are smokers is that we are far better off here than if we had been at Michael Barrymore’s house.

‘Because there they removed all the ashtrays on the basis that now they chuck all the fags in the pool.’

Daily Mail.

Now this is funny.

Not Nigel Farage's joke about the death of a gay man, obvs.

How long have the Mail been sitting on this video?

And was it released now as a final pre-election bombshell?

And did they think this would turn their readers off Farage, rather than warm to him even more?

And finally, you may want to read this Observer interview with Barrymore from 2002, where he attacks his 'trial by tabloid'.

PS Did this play a part in NF pulling out of answering questions from Pink News readers?

Matthew Parris: On Public Prosecutions

Last weekend my former parliamentary colleague Harvey Proctor published in a Sunday newspaper a moving statement. You may remember that two months ago the police raided his home in Leicestershire, spending 15 hours there and taking away his mobile phone, his laptop and all his personal records. They told him (and still tell him) he is not a suspect in their Operation Midland inquiry into historical child abuse; but they tipped off the media anyway, and a storm broke over Harvey’s head.

Declaring his complete innocence, and ignorance of anything about the fabled “Westminster gay paedophile sex ring” and anxious to put this on the record he has begged for an early interview, but the police keep postponing it. Now he has lost his home and his job. Desperate to resume his life, he challenges the police to “put up or shut up”.

I know Harvey. We talked on Monday. I’m convinced he had nothing to do with any MPs’ paedophile ring and doubt it existed. My guess is that the police have realised this too but won’t climb down and admit that by turning a routine search into a nationally publicised raid they have shattered a life and impugned a reputation. So they leave an innocent man to rot, until the interest they stirred up has faded.

From Matthew Parris' Times Diary.

Mr Parris does not mention this, but in a sympathetic profile in Friday's Independent, Proctor says that a supportive phone call and dinner invitation from Matthew stopped Harvey from killing himself.

Last week, Parris had this to say about Lord Janner...

I have no brief for (Lord) Greville Janner. I found him ingratiating and a bit of a bully. And I haven’t the least idea of the truth of allegations against him, nor any view on whether today he’s fit to plead.

But in attacking the judgment of Alison Saunders as director of public prosecutions, the behaviour of senior politicians, from the PM and home secretary downwards, was disgraceful. As for (Lord) Ken Macdonald, in post as DPP when it was decided not to prosecute Janner — to criticise his successor in print was offside.

DPPs are independent, they make decisions on the information they have, and the whole idea of their office is that they should accept no interference from politicians, peers or newspaper editorials. They must stand outside what some prattling MP has called — in that sinister phrase — “the court of public opinion”. This general election is corroding the judgments of people who ought to (and, worse, do) know better.

How strange so many journalists have remained silent on these two very different, but equally rum cases.

And how sad so many politicians have spoken out for the posturing populism of overturning the DPP's Janner decision.

General Erection 2015: Geddit???

We have been watching Ipsos MORI and YouGov all campaign long – they're not giving us any clues.

One minute the Conservatives are surging ahead, the next Labour look as though they might have a real shot.

So I thought I would conduct my own poll exclusive to Daily Star Online to find out who's really going to be our next Prime Minister.

Using blow-up sex dolls.

That's right – there are now blow-up dolls shaped like our very own prospective PMs Ed Miliband and David Cameron. Milifans and Cameronettes eat your heart out.

So what did people think?

I took our many-holed but decently-dressed friends to the streets of the political heart of our country – Westminster...

Daily Star.

I'd've loved to have been at the editorial meeting that thought this was a real humdinger.

PS And this classy headline is even beneath me...

General Election 2015: Those Celebrity Gay Backers In Full

Conservatives: Christopher Biggins.

Only patron of LGBTory who's not an MP!

Though they can also count on Ivan Massow and David Starkey*, too!

What a right bunch of right-wing gay cunts, eh?

Lib Dems: Patrick Smugtwit?

Probably.

He is Britain's most boring wet liberal poove.

And it's a family affair!

Green: Peter Tatchell.

And who better to dispel the myth that the Greens are all a bit nutty, than the publicity shy campaigning celeb?

Pete's probably said somewhere that he founded the Green Party, if not Planet Earth itself.

Bless.

Labour: Owen Jones.

No, really, he is. Trust me on this one.

SNP: Alan Cumming.

Was often wheeled out during the 'Yes!' campaign.

But like their most famous celeb supporter, Sean Connery, Mr Cumming is an ex-pat. Oops!

'England for the English...' etc etc.

Ukip: Morrissey.

"I nearly voted for Ukip. I like Nigel Farage a great deal," he told Loaded in 2013.

"His views are quite logical – especially where Europe is concerned."

And La Mozza's views are highly logical, too.

She loves England so much she's spent much of the last 20 years living abroad in tax exile, cos it's been flooded with foreigners, innit?

Silly old queen.

* Dr Starkey threatened to do a big queeny flounce and leave the country if Cameron didn't win the 2010 General Election. Paul O'Grady - a man Fagburn much admires - has said he'll leave if the Tories win again this time. It's usually the most unbearable right-wing shits who do this - I am unaware if anyone has actually carried it out.

PS If you decide how to vote because of something a famous person has said, may I implore you not to vote tomorrow?

Update: Undecided/Undeclared - Will Young. Former politics student Will Nice-But-Dim offered his astute analysis to Digital Spy; 'I don't know, it'll be a hung parliament and it all just feels like a wet fart.'

Thought For The Day: Chelsea Manning

I believe that when the public lacks even the most fundamental access to what its governments and militaries are doing in their names, then they cease to be involved in the act of citizenship. There is a bright distinction between citizens, who have rights and privileges protected by the state, and subjects, who are under the complete control and authority of the state.

From an article on freedom of information on The Guardian's Comment Is Free.

Cuba: La Revolucion Continua!

Cuban gay rights activists led by the daughter of President Raul Castro plan a mass symbolic wedding on Saturday to promote acceptance of gay and transgender Cubans in a country once notoriously hostile toward them.

The ceremony will be part of an annual gay pride parade and will be symbolic because same-sex marriage is illegal in Cuba, Mariela Castro told reporters. She said it would also be low key because Cuban society is still uneasy about full rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

"We can't do a wedding, but we wanted to have a very modest celebration of love with some religious leaders," said Castro, head of the National Sex Education Center and a member of Cuba's National Assembly. "In the future we'll see what more we can do." ...

Cuban gays have made great strides in recent years, largely because of Mariela Castro's political standing, but same-sex marriage and civil unions remain illegal.

Some public attitudes changed when retired leader Fidel Castro admitted in 2010 that he had been wrong to discriminate against gays, who were sent to labor camps in the early years after the 1959 revolution. [Mainly as an alternative to military conscription, they were hardly gulags. Gay men were still being imprisoned in the freedom-loving US and UK then, of course].

Cuba's National Assembly last year approved a labor law that banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. But Mariela Castro voted against the law in an extremely rare and possibly unprecedented dissenting vote because the law did not also ban discrimination based on gender identity.

Cuba's one-party political system traditionally operates on consensus, which Castro said was one reason lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Cubans still lack full legal rights.

"There is a fear that this will tear Cuban society apart," Castro said. But, she said she believed it would not create a rupture. "It will create cultural and ideological enrichment."

Reuters.

The situation of gay men in Cuba was mainly 'notorious' in the West because the US gay and straight media were obsessed with it in the 70s and 80s, when Cuba was Uncle Sam's Public Enemy Number One.

You be hard pressed to find a single one about gay life in the capitalist paradises next door, Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Just as a supine media were obsessed with the plight of Iranian gay men a decade ago, and with Russia's in recent years.

You may sense a pattern here... Pinkwashing in reverse.

General Election 2015: Carry On Campaigning

While we’re on the subject of locker-room horseplay, though, could there please – in the name of all that is decent – be a moratorium on politicians making jokes about sexy time? In Hendon, Cameron was reiterating that to vote for Ukip is to “go to bed with Nigel Farage and wake up with Ed Miliband. I don’t know about you,” he twinkled suggestively to the audience, “but no part of that works for me”. Last week it was Ed Miliband referring to the idea of having to go into a “darkened room” with Nick Clegg, telling the Question Time audience: “I don’t like the sound of that,” he oo-erred, “for a whole range of reasons”.

Guys, guys … Please. We get it. YOU’RE ALL STRAIGHT. You’re not mining some comic seam here – you’re doing the equivalent of going into the gents’ and writing “NIJEL FARRARGE DONE IT WITH NICK CLEG!!!!!” on the wall...

Marina Hyde, The Guardian's election diary.

Stranger On The Bridge: Manufacturing A Twitterstorm

ENOUGH with the ads for #strangeronthebridge Starting to wish the sympathetic stranger had let him jump.

— Katie Hopkins (@KTHopkins) May 4, 2015

A self-styled 'gobby columnist' who gets paid a lot of many for saying outrageous and offensive things, has again said something outrageous and offensive, Gay Fagburn News can exclusively reveal.

Yesterday, in response to a documentary, Stranger On The Bridge, about a depressed gay man who a stranger had talked out of suicide, Katie Hopkins tweeted that she wished he'd jumped to his death.

Lots of people pointed out this was an unbelievably shitty thing to say. Ms Hopkins just cackled and counted her money, while thinking of a way to make light of the Holocaust.

General Election 2015: Pink Turning Red

I saw something very Brighton on Bank Holiday Monday. A woman putting bottles into a bottle bank noticed that one of them had a drop of wine left in it. She unscrewed the cap, downed it, and then dropped it in the bank. To combine recycling with alcoholism is about as Brighton as it gets...

Kemptown, in the east, has also seen a massive influx of Labour campaigners – and the dominance is shown in the number of Labour signs in windows. I spoke to a gay couple basking in the sun outside a café. One said: "Yeah, we’ll probably go with Labour… Ed’s not very impressive is he? But anything rather than Cameron.”

“Ed looks weird,” added his partner. “That mouth.”

I asked if the Tory embrace of gay marriage had made any difference to their voting intentions, and they said that it hadn’t. “I mean, we’ve not got married have we?” observed one with a raised eyebrow – suggesting that I’d opened a can of worms. “But Labour would’ve backed gay marriage anyway, so it doesn’t make any difference.” 

This is a view that might not be true, given national polling evidence that the Tories are now doing much better among gay voters * – although, not well enough to hold on to a constituency that could be described as the San Francisco of England. Then again, Kemptown has always been a very working-class kind of gay scene. There are a lot of middle-aged couples sporting tattoos that probably hail from the days of Margaret Thatcher...

Tim Stanley, Daily Telegraph.

Fagburn is proud to announce he is voting Nancy on Thursday - I think this may well swing the election.

PS Radio 4's Today attends a gay hustings in Vauxhall to find out 'Where is the pink vote?'

* Fagburn on why the Pink News' readers poll is unrepresentative of gay voters. Today also cited it without question.

Mind you, this one could be the most unscientific gay election survey of all time; Most Grindr Readers Back The SNP!

Tom Daley: Master Of Watersports

Great Britain's Tom Daley puts in an impressive display to win gold in the men's 10m platform at the Diving World Series in London.

Daley picked up the highest score of the final with 102.60 in the fifth of his six dives on his way to winning gold ahead of evil Chinese robot duo Jian Yang and Bo Qiu.

BBC News. 

Includes a video of Tomasina diving and talking in his adorable gold medal-winning fagcent.

Sadly we hear a certain wizened Californian cradle snatcher was 'in da house'.

Sex Tips For Gays: Fear Of Bumsex

I am a 28-year-old gay man. In previous relationships I was – mainly – the top. I have been with my current partner for two years and in this relationship I have only been the bottom, as my partner has a fear of it. I am very frustrated, and have contemplated cheating, which fills me with guilt. I love him very much, but feel as though we are incompatible on this basic level.

Find out what The Guardian's agony aunt, Pamela Stephenson Connolly, says here.

Though the UK's most liberal newspaper's readers' responses are fascinating.

One points out; 'Seriously, these comments are pathetic, theres a million articles on here about straight peoples bedroom problems, saying "eww" or making cheap jokes is exactly the problem of non direct homophobia, you are creating an atmosphere where gay men like myself feel unable to discuss relationship problems openly and this causes huge problems, especially in young people.

'Honestly if you have no advice and just commented here to crack a joke of make it clear how disgusted you are by gay men loving each other and being intimate then frankly you should be ashamed.'

Harvey Proctor: I Don't Believe It!

In the context of recent speculation and allegations on the internet, I write this to say that I am innocent of the allegations against me and I will maintain this stance until my dying breath.

On Wednesday 4 March 2015, the Metropolitan Police’s Operation Midland Team raided my home and, under a warrant investigating historical child sexual abuse, searched my house for 15 hours. I was told at 11pm that no statement would be issued to the press and my identity would not come out. That was not the case.

If not before, then within eight hours of the police leaving my home, details of the raid were leaked to the national media. ExaroNews – an odd internet news agency – was tipped off before the police left my home. Mark Conrad, a journalist for the agency, was phoning and emailing my office at 9.34pm – at least 90 minutes before the police left my house.

During and immediately after the search, I volunteered to be interviewed by the Metropolitan Police concerning Operation Midland’s investigations relating to allegations from the 1970s and Eighties...

So the “organisation” – strange term for the Metropolitan Police’s Murder Squad – has raided my house, searched it for 15 hours, removed my communications and computer equipment and many boxes of historic documents and other irrelevant material from the 1970s and Eighties, prompted me to retire from my job of 13 years and to leave my home. They have ruined 28 years of my life’s rehabilitation after 1987 and they are not prepared to meet me and interview me. They have said to my solicitors, but not to the media, that I am not a suspect and they merely wish for me to assist the police with their inquiries.

In 1987, Detective Chief Superintendent Drummond Marvin of Scotland Yard’s Serious Crime Squad was the officer in charge of my prosecution. I pleaded guilty to four charges of gross indecency. Offences which, because of the changes in the law regarding the homosexual age of consent, are no longer offences.

The People.

Chief Superintendent Marvin subsequently wrote a book and sold his story to The Sun newspaper. He wrote about three of his cases: Lord Lucan, Russell Harty and myself. In the article about me he stated for the first time, as far as I am aware, the felonious notion that there was a rent-boy ring at Westminster. If there was one, I was not aware of it, it was news to me and I was not part of it. Marvin’s article was wrong on this and on other matters.

I have always tried to protect my privacy – not because I thought I was breaking the law, but because I consider sexual matters to be private, except where they are illegal. Not just for me but for everyone. I refuse to comment on these matters now save to say anything and everything I have done has been consensual. But with alarming frequency, when I was visited by the police in 1987, journalists from the Sunday People were outside my flat.

I have not flaunted my sexuality. It is the press and the police who have time and time again invaded my privacy. In 1987, the press wired a witness for sound and was sent into my apartment. The police trawled the gay bars of London, showing my photograph to all and sundry, asking: “Have you slept with this man?” Today the modern-day equivalent is for senior police officers to go on the airways enticing so called “victims” to come out of the woodwork, telling them, without even speaking to them, that they would be believed.

Now, the guide to misinformation and the oracle of disinformation is the internet. It is a totally impossible media with which to engage, as hundreds of thousands of comments appear daily, with no chance of rebuttal.

At the behest of a weird assortment of alleged victims, ex-police officers, bishops, social workers, attention seekers and “nutters”, former, respected politicians have had their reputations trashed without a shred of evidence – Sir Leon Brittan, Sir Keith Joseph, Dr Rhodes Boyson and Enoch Powell to name but a few. They are dead; they cannot defend themselves. I am alive; I can and I will.

Enough is enough. Someone has to stand up and say the Emperor is wearing no clothes...

From an open letter published in The Independent.

Fagburn's said it before and I'll say it again; just cause Harvey Proctor is an odious far right racist shitbag, it doesn't mean he's guilty of any of these fantastical accusations.

Will Self: Oscar Wilde, Champagne Socialism And Why I'm Voting Labour

Wilde seeks to define the individual type of the coming socialist age: “With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” It might be argued that in rejecting the institutions of marriage and family, while taking himself – a quasi-closeted gay artist in hypocritical late-Victorian England – as the representative type of the coming age, Wilde was genuinely prophetic. After all, whatever else we may say about contemporary Britain, there’s little doubt that many people perceive it as a society in which they can be themselves sexually, individually and creatively; that this self-realisation is fully articulated within capitalist metrics would presumably be shocking even to Wilde. Soothsayer or not, he never imagined the pink pound would become legal tender...

Wilde writes: “Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” Yet for him, in his essay, the two are conflated, because for all utopians, no matter how anarchistic they may think themselves to be, the premise underlying their brave new worlds is that everyone cravenly become exactly like them – and while I myself am perfectly happy to emulate Wilde, I’m not sure being a flamboyant literary figure is likely to fulfil everyone’s needs, nor lie within everyone’s ability. No, I’m no longer a socialist if to be one is to believe that a socialist utopia is attainable by some collective feat of will – but I remain a socialist, if by “socialism” is understood an antipathy to vested interests and privileges neither deserved nor earned, and a strong desire for a genuinely egalitarian society. And that is why, for the first time since 1997, I will be voting Labour in a general election.

Will Self, The Guardian Review.

And here is The Soul Of Man Under Socialism of which Will writes.

Russia: How Could This Happen?

Police in St. Petersburg wouldn't allow controversial legislator Vitaly Milonov, best known for his anti-gay stance, to interfere with a gay pride march on May Day. He tried to stop the march on the grounds of a 'gay propaganda' law he himself sponsored.

An LGBT activists' column was part of Friday's massive rally, which marched along Nevsky Prospect, the city's main street. More than 90,000 people from all ranges of the political spectrum participated, from the ruling United Russia party to Communists and various small opposition groups.

Milonov along with a group of about a dozen of supporters tried to block the gay pride column, which was carrying rainbow flags and banners calling for tolerance, including one depiction of the politician himself.

He wanted to stop the activists, saying they were violating a controversial law he sponsored a few years ago, which bans propaganda of gay lifestyle to minors, and brought some minors among his supporters to make his case, the Fontanka newspaper reported.

His other complaint was about Ukrainian and American flags being carried by another part of the marching column allied with the LGBT activists...

Police officers guarding the rally were not impressed with the argument. They asked the lawmaker and his group to move aside and not provoke a conflict.

The discouraged MP and his group let the column pass and went after them, with police keeping the two separated. They went their separate ways eventually...

Russia Today - or as it is invariably called in the Western media ;'the state-funded Russia Today'.

Unlike our own BBC, of course.

Clearly this did not happen, as the same obedient Western media are always saying there is a total ban on all gay protests in Russia.

Ho hum...

Equality!: Irony Collapses, Dies Laughing

Pink News.

Morons!: Rejoice At This News!

PInkwashing Exposed: Trailer

Trailer: Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back! from Pinkwashing Exposed on Vimeo.

"Pinkwashing" is a term activists have coined for when countries engaged in terrible human rights violations promote themselves as "gay friendly" to improve their public image. Israel is the country most famous for this strategy, having initiated it as part of a rebranding campaign has been engaged in for the last decade. 

In 2012, activists in the Pacific Northwestern region of the US responded to an Israeli Consulate-funded pinkwashing tour featuring Israeli gay and lesbian activists that was coming to the region. Local queer Palestine solidarity activists exposed the "Rainbow Generations" tour as pro-Israel propaganda and got some of the events, including the tour's centerpiece event hosted by the City of Seattle's LGBT Commission, cancelled. A significant backlash ensued involving the Seattle City Council and Seattle's leading LGBT and HIV organizations. 

Through the inspiring story of these activists' victory, Pinkwashing Exposed explores how pinkwashing works and what local activists are doing to fight back.

Vimeo.

Here's a Truthout interview with the director, Dean Spade...

We all need to learn how to read state rhetoric that promises to promote our interests - uses our images and our struggles' terminology - in order to preserve and expand the violence of racist, colonial regimes. Pinkwashing is one overt version of this politics that we can identify and resist in our work to build real transformation rather than celebrating when governments simply change the window-dressing in order to shut us up and keep justifying and expanding harm.

The documentary will be available to watch free online - check in here.

May Day: Solidarity!