Nothing Much Happening

Sorry.
Nothing worth writing about has happened.
I'll be right back as soon as it does.

Grazia: For The Man In Your Woman

"Monkey's second favourite celebrity fashion weekly with an iota of serious news, Grazia, is to introduce a blokeish insert with the strapline "for the man in your life". Among those who may be surprised by the Bauer Media mag's implicit assumption that its readers are neither single nor lesbian is Melanie Rickey, its fashion editor-at-large – she is the civil partner of Mary Portas, BBC2's Queen of Shops."

from The Guardian's Media Monkey's Diary

David Laws: Missing

David Laws has stepped out of the shadows and given his first interview since the cock-up that led to his coming out and resignation in May.
You can hear the interview with the former Treasury Secretary on BBC Radio 5 Live at 7pm in the unfortunately titled Pienaar's Politics.
Asked if he missed being a minister, Laws said; "Everybody wants to be in the front line".
Although seeing as his cut-loving Lib-Dem colleagues in the Con-Dem coalition couldn't be less popular if they were caught putting cats in wheelie bins, Mr Laws stepping aside now looks like a pretty smart move.

UPDATE: He couldn't/wouldn't talk about expenses or his coming out. Ho-hum...

New York: Don't Believe The Hype

There's a textbook example of the Phil Space school of journalism in The Observer today.
'US shaken by sudden surge of violence against gays'
"Carl Paladino, a Republican politician running for governor, is calling for gay people to be barred from teaching in New York, where homophobic attacks are on the rise," writes Paul Harris.
But where is the evidence of there being a "sudden surge of violence against gays"?
Where is the evidence that in New York "homophobic attacks are on the rise"?
This is the economy of journalism - as "Dog bites man" is not news, why not claim there's an epidemic of dogs biting men?
The journalist writes about the Latin King Goonies gang beatings in the Bronx.
"The shocking crime was just one of a series of incidents that have hit the city. Others have even occurred in the heart of New York's vibrant gay scene. In the Chelsea neighbourhood, which has a large gay population, a group of men hugging each other goodbye after a night out were punched and had a rubbish bin thrown at them.
"Meanwhile in the famous Stonewall Inn, where the modern gay rights movement was founded after a police raid in 1969, a customer was beaten and robbed by men who hurled homophobic insults at him."
Does Harris seriously think that gaybashing is a rare event in New York, even in its gayborhoods?
The attack in The Stonewall Inn was no more or no less terrible than too many others (and may not have been a hate crime), but - like pissing on a war memorial - it became newsworthy purely because of its symbolism.
Harris continues; "For many observers the violence has been especially worrying as it has come at the same time as several leading Republicans have made anti-gay statements."
Oh please.
When a leading Republican politician doesn't make anti-gay statements at election time, then that will be news.

Cameron & Schwarzenegger: The Importance Of Not Being A Girlyman

"It is important not to be an economic girlyman."

Arnold Schwarzenegger to David Cameron at Downing Street, quoted in the Telegraph.

Gay Babies: There's One Born Every Minute

There's a textbook example of the Phil Space school of journalism in The Sunday Times today.
"Time was when would-be parents, asked if they wanted boys or girls, would automatically reply: “Oh, we don’t care, so long as they’re healthy.” muses Shane Watson.
"Not any more. When the newlywed Robbie Williams was asked this question recently he replied: “I really want a gay one.” Just-married Lara Stone was even more specific: “I’d like little gay boys.”
"...You may find this hard to swallow, but it was only a matter of time before the gay baby cropped up on the wish list of the rich and famous. When you’ve got the rock, the aviator jacket, the house in the country, naturally you’re looking for the next new thing — and adopting from Africa is so last season. Plus there’s so much more reason to bother — from the celebs’ point of view — if you can guarantee he’ll be your walker, favourite shopping companion, gossip partner and personal stylist. Clever, isn’t it?"
OH FFS! THEY WERE JOKING YOU SILLY MOO!

ExpoGays: More Money Than Sense

There's a textbook example of the Phil Space school of journalism in The Independent On Sunday today.
A small "trade fair" in Torremolinos is puffed up as; 'Pink Euro Soars In Value'.
Fuck knows why this non-event is deemed worthy of a mini-feature.
I can't imagine four minutes spent reading this added anything to anyone's Sunday - except the organisers'.
Although Fagburn envies anyone who can wangle a free "working" weekend in Torremolinos, he suspects that anyone who actually paid cash-money to hire a stall at "ExpoGays" has fuck-all business sense.

X Factor: Diva Fever Barbra Streisand Duck Sauce "Camp" (Whatever That Means) (I Don't Know, Best Stick To Cliches At Times Like This) Amazingness!

Fagburn thinks this joyously queeny interruption to teatime TV Land needs to be preserved for posterity.
"Camp" X Factor contestants, Diva Fever, do 'Barbra Streisand' by Duck Sauce.
Orbiting your living room!
Fantastic!

Derren Brown: Mind Reader?

“You live in this day and age which is far from perfect but fairly enlightened, but you’ve lived with this really awkward area [of not being out]... When you let that go you expect a big reaction from people — but, of course, you don’t get one because they’ve either already guessed, or they don’t really care; it isn’t a big deal to them. It was kind of elating, the discovery that you don’t have to worry.”

Derren Brown admits he's rubbish at mind-reading, The Times.

Things I Learnt Today: A Doodle of Dorian Gray

That blurry image on the Google homepage is meant to be a tribute to Oscar Wilde on his 156th birthday.
If only there was an amusing quote from Oscar about Google Doodles that I could cut-and-paste here...

Interview: Dustin Lance Black

Oliver Stone interviews the adorable and eminently boyfriendable Dustin Lance Black in Interview.

Milk was a hero to many people. What attracted you to [J Edgar] Hoover?
"The attraction to Milk was pretty obvious. He's a father figure. I thought it might be worth investigating the opposite of Milk - what a cautionary historical figure would be like. This is a tale of a closet case, as opposed to an inspirational tale of a man brave enough to come out. It's almost the flip side. I'm always interested in getting to know people, and that means vilified people as much as those celebrated. You find out that heroes aren't always so heroic, and villains have some bit of humanity in them. As much as I went into this project not really liking Hoover and feeling upset with so much of what he did and what civil rights he violated, there is a person there, a human being. If you don't humanize him and try to show why he did the things he did, then you are left with this cardboard figure of Hoover-whether it's one with the "G-Man" machine gun or in a dress. I wanted to figure out who the guy really was..."

Musicals: Escape to the M6

"I have an idea for a new musical. It would feature a classical ballet dancer who, weary of life at the barre and of playing swan-loving princes, yearns to escape to the real world and become a navvy. A rigid class system makes this difficult. But finally our hero, Cedric, flees the confines of the rehearsal room and finds ecstatic fulfilment in the company of butch Irish road workers on the northernmost stretch of the M6..."

Michael Billington dreams up a real role-reversal musical in The Guardian.

President Obama: Shot By Both Sides

"It takes a special genius in politics to be assailed by both sides of an argument and receive no credit at all for standing in the middle. That is the position into which Barack Obama appears needlessly to have manoeuvred himself on gay rights. Social conservatives complain that he has done too little to “defend marriage” (by which they mean preventing gays from marrying), and that his plan to allow gays to serve openly in the military will spook America’s warriors. Gay activists complain that he has so far been too timid on both fronts. And, as luck would have it, Virginia Phillips, a federal judge in California, made a ruling this week that has tossed the question of gay rights back into the public eye at the most uncomfortable possible moment for the White House: three weeks before November’s mid-term elections..."

The Economist comes out against Obama's timidity on gay rights, An Own Goal On Gay Rights.
The picture shows an anti-Obama poster that has appeared over a freeway in Colorado for the US mid-term elections.
The one on the far right is meant to symbolise how he is overfond of The Gays - alongside terrorists, gangsters and Mexican immigrants.
One lousy poster, that's got endless free publicity - including as per usual on here.

Perez Hilton: No More Mr Nasty Gay

Bullying fat-fighting pointless fame slut Perez Hilton says he's going to stop being nasty about celebrities.
Good for him.
"I'm going to do things differently on my website than I have in the past. I'm not going to call people nasty nicknames. I'm not going to go the mean route. I'm going to force myself to be funnier or smarter."
The recent gay teen suicides was Perez's Pauline moment; "From now on I really want to be part of the solution and not part of the problem," he told Ellen DeGeneres.
"I don't want to be a bully. I don't want to be called a bully."
So presumably he'll stop outing gay celebs, and posting private photos of them at it.
Fine.
But isn't this like Amazon saying they're going to stop selling books?
Then what is point?

Graham Norton: A Licence Payer Speaks

Congratulations are in order to Graham Norton.
Interviewed in The Daily Mail today, he manages to both defend the BBC they so despise and have a sly little dig at the Daily Mail's campaign against it.
"The BBC is attacked for spending £50,000 on taxis or whatever. But they haven’t gone round to a pensioner’s flat, ­stolen her furniture and sold it to pay for cab rides. People pay £3 a week for a TV licence, the price of a pint of lager. That’s incredible value. I’d pay £3 for BBC1 alone, or Radio 4.
"As it is, that buys your four TV channels, seven radio stations, online content such as iPlayer, and a lot more besides.
"There are two great institutions in this country: the NHS and the BBC and some people seem determined to destroy both. End of rant."
Funnily enough the Mail were only knocking the profligacy of the BBC on Tuesday; 'I'm a lousy interviewer says BBC's £2m Graham Norton.'
But congratulations to the Daily Mail today for running a whole interview that doesn't let on that Graham's a big you-know-what.
However over on the Mail messageboards, readers' opinions are divided about Mr Norton.
"He obviously loves what he does. I especially like it when he gets a fit of giggles. He seems a very happy chap." Elizabeth.
"What on earth do people see in this over the top, overly camp, screeching idiot anyway?" John Gray.
"He pulls arch faces, is the master of the crude double entendre and shrieks and cavorts in a way that mercifully few gay characters ever do in fictionalised TV dramas. Much of his humour is simply, I’m sorry to say, just vulgar."
Actually that last one isn't from the messageboards.
It's a quote from the Daily Mail's gay-but-not-gay-gay columnist, Andrew Pierce

George Michael: Straight Outta Hampstead

And talking of what happened to ex-members of boybands...
The Daily Mirror is wondering where George Michael of Wham! fame is now.
Meanwhile, over in The Times, Keith Richards is asked what he makes of Mr Michael's latest brush with lily law.
"You know what? I bet George Michael is loving it. I say, ‘Stay in jail, George.’ There’s probably some dope and some gays. He probably won’t want to leave — it’s the best place for him. He’s playing around with fame. I can’t remember a song of his. I don’t want to knock the guy, but I’m an immortal legend, according to some."

Boybands: West End Girls

In The Guardian, Caroline Sullivan finds out what happens to boyband members after that all too fleeting moment of stardom, 'How To Avoid The Boyband Graveyard'.
But she neglects to mention Fagburn's most favourite career shift; come out and/or appear in a ropey West End musical.

It Gets Better: Who Cares?

No-one could say the idea behind the Youtube channel It Gets Better - where people post videos offering hope to lonely, possibly suicidal gay kids - is a bad idea.
But as the number of people who'd say they want gay teenagers to kill themselves is close to zero, its message can fall victim to banalification.
And its tragic subject gets buried under an avalanche of sentimental vomit.
Though maybe the real problem lies with the medium, not the message?
YouTube - despite its democratic potential - is the world's biggest vanity project.
It's no surprise that many of the videos posted on It Gets Better are just like the videos posted everywhere else on YouTube/MeTube; attention-seeking, solipsistic, self-aggrandizing, self-promoting.
This admirable project is now making the news, but often it's just to tell us the latest celebrities who've jumped on board.
Hell yes they care - but then again, who doesn't?
In the 1990 trial of Heavy Metal band Judas Priest - charged with putting hidden messages on an album that encouraged two young fans to commit suicide - the defence argued that if they knew how to record subliminal messages they'd make one that said; "Buy more of our records."
Heaven forfend that there are subliminal messages on any of the It Gets Better videos.
"Please don't kill yourself - we've got a new single out on Monday."

Gore Vidal: "Some Very God-awful People"

"What are you going to do with people who aren't educated? I'm not talking about your gorgeous universities and so on. I'm talking about the basic facts of life, which are not taught. Then there was that sickly wave of religion that swept over the country after the Second World War. Don't think that we were not horrified by it, those of us who are natives of the USA. Any kind of idiot could appear on television - television was our ruin - and Congress, which was always very good for the superstitious, said: "Religion is such a good thing that we are not going to tax it." This was the gateway to great wealth for some very God-awful people. "God-awful" is carefully selected there."

Melvyn Bragg interviews Gore Vidal, America's leading octogenarian left-leaning patrician homosexualist man of letters, in the New Statesman

Against Equality: Ban Marriage

Currently on a discussion tour in the US are contributors to Against Marriage: Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage, a new book published by the Against Equality collective.
There's quite a good piece on them in Chicago's Windy City News.
"People ask, 'How can you possibly be against equality? That's like being against rainbows ... and all things good?'" Yasmin Nair is quoted as saying.
"[But] equality... What does equality mean and how has it been used and deployed over the years to signify anything good and grandiose and progressive? A lot of people say 'progressives' and 'gays' as if they mean the same thing. But what we're contending in this book is that, no, what constitutes the gay movement today is actually the gay right. It's a deeply conservative movement."
"What you get in the 1990s is a break, as it were, for the gay community. You get a rise in the professional, upper middle class of gay people. You also get, at the same time, is this breakdown in the notion of a public sexual culture; so you see Times Square being cleaned out and Disney-fied, for example. And the two things actually come together: a gay professional class and a de-sexing of queer culture (and straight life as well).
"So you get this conservatism. You get gay people who think Aids is over; in fact, it's not... What starts to happen is that there's this idea that 'gay' is a class identity. People have this stereotype: They think that [gays] are all rich and have the picket-fence lifestyle.
"And within that framework of this change, you get marriage coming in. Marriage becomes the ultimate form of respectability..."
The book should soon be available to order in the UK from AK Press.

• And, as if by magic, here are The Hidden Cameras performing 'Ban Marriage'

The Inbetweeners: Front Page News

Today I came the closest I've come to buying a copy of the NME I have in years.
It had The Inbetweeners on the cover.
Not a band of course, but a TV show.
"Oh, has the world changed or have I changed..." etc etc

NY Street Gangs More Gay-Friendly Than US Army

ABC News in New York interviews one of three young men tortured and sexually assaulted by members of the Latin King Goonies gang in what's being reported as an anti-gay hate crime.
The 17 year-old was told after the attack that it wasn't personal, and he could still be in the gang.
Which means that the Latin King Goonies are still more accepting of gay men in their ranks than the US Army.
God bless America!

Prince Saud Murder Trial: The William Hague Defence

[Prince Saud] was immediately arrested on suspicion of murder but refused to answer questions, instead giving the police a statement in which he explained why the pair shared a room.
“This way we could talk with each late into the evening, watch films and generally have fun,” said the 34-year-old.
“We preferred to save our money for shopping and evenings out.”
He said when they asked to change to a bigger room, only one with a double bed was available.
“We asked for another bed to be brought in but that couldn’t be made available.
“We did not use the sofa bed as, throughout our entire trip, Bandar and I had travelled as equals and I didn’t want him to feel any different to me for sleeping on a sofa bed.
“We had no issue at with sharing a bed.”

From today's Daily Telegraph, always the go-to newspaper for highly detailed and prurient court reporting.

The Sun: Sorry Lads!

KATY PERRY'S last video featured her naked while reclining on a candyfloss cloud.
And her next effort is likely to raise a few eyebrows as well. But not for those reasons.
The promo to accompany Fireworks features a gay smooch.
And sorry lads, this time the chart-topper ain't kissing girls.
Instead shots show two men puckering up.
RUSSELL BRAND must be relieved his wife to be didn't ask him to make a cameo appearance in this one.

The Sun, where double standards come as standard, Katy Perry Has A Gay Old Time

Remembering Claire Rayner

The Gay and Lesbian Humanism Association (GALHA) wishes to express its deep regret at the death of its friend and champion, Claire Rayner.
Claire’s long standing support both for Humanism and for gay equality is exemplified by her agreeing to serve as one of GALHA’s Vice Presidents for more than 20 years.
GALHA ex-Chair Derek Lennard commented: “Even when it was very difficult and controversial to do so, she spoke out on our behalf against the blasphemy laws, discriminatory employment laws and in support of same sex marriage.”
Expressing her opposition Section 28 in 1993 Claire told the then Education Minister that: “It is not morally acceptable to treat homosexuals as some sort of inferior beings. just because of religious or any other considerations”.
Some 40 years ago she told a meeting of hesitant gay campaigners: “There’s nothing wrong with you, but there’s a lot wrong with the way society and politicians treat you. Just by being here tonight, proves that you’ve had enough and intend to organise, be visible, win friends and change the world you’re living in”.
Even in the last weeks of her life when she was already very ill Claire was voicing her strong support for the wave of opposition to the policies and positions of Pope Benedict during his recent visit to the UK, a campaign which GALHA also championed.
Claire also earlier played a critical role in advancing gay rights as one of a generation of “Agony Aunts” who saw gay people as normal human beings with hopes, needs, loves and problems much like the rest of the population. This was enormously helpful in fighting discrimination and in combating the irrational – and often religiously based – prejudices that blighted the lives of so many gay men and women, as they still do today in many societies...

'Gay Humanists Mourn Friend and Champion Claire Rayner', GALHA