03/24/2006
Human Rights Watch demands Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo withdraw bill that would punish its citizens with "up to five years' imprisonment for anyone who engages in homosexual sex, organises gay rights organisations or partakes in, sanctions or witnesses same-sex marriage ceremonies."
Oak Park, Illinois (where this blogger attended high school long ago) has issued a proclamation welcoming the Gay Games to Chicago. Oak Park will proudly host several events. Take that, Crystal Lake.
Jason Statham gets hard for Bent.
The Joy of Sex at work in Morrissey's Ringleader: "One shouldn't be startled to hear a middle-aged man singing about having sex with another man, but this is Morrissey, who has spent 30 years deflecting questions about his sexuality by claiming that he didn't have sex with anyone. Twenty-three years after offering the most memorable come-on in pop history - "you can pin and mount me," suggested the Smiths' Reel Around the Fountain, "like a butterfly" - here he is, finally admitting that someone has taken him up, so to speak. The subsequent relief yields one of the loveliest and most affecting moments of his entire career: strings soar, drums thump and Morrissey's voice vanishes slowly into the distance, singing: "The heart feels free, the heart feels free." He sounds contented, which proves oddly touching - and that there's a first time for everything."
Amnesty International launches new campaign to end police abuse of LGBT people.
Former NFL player Esera Tuaolo speaks of childhood in new memoir: "Fear started for me when I was a young kid, hearing friends of mine call other kids faggot or that he likes to play with Barbie dolls. I saw a part of me in that kid, because that's what I wanted to do! I wanted to play with Barbie dolls, I wanted an Easy-Bake oven! That's the day I took that child within all of us and threw him in the closet. I had to be bigger and stronger and faster than anybody else so that they wouldn't know that I was gay. I wouldn't be that kid getting beat up, that kid getting rocks thrown at him. Not me. I put on that happy face, I smiled a lot. I was just Mr. Aloha."
Posted 10:41 AM EST by Andy Towle in Elsewhere | Permalink
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The people in Crystal Lake are probably just bitter because of that persistent film series taking place in a similarly named place...
Posted by: Seangstm | Mar 24, 2006 11:53:04 AM
I was born in Oak Park! WOOhoo!
Posted by: opiper | Mar 25, 2006 12:18:44 AM
Isn't it ironic that where the right-wing dictator oil magnates like Nigeria and the Arab Muslim states, have long prison sentences, or Sharia executions, while the theocons revile Chavez of Venezuela, who guarantees full gay human rights in the new Venezuelan Constitution?
How dare Chavez provide his citizens with the benefits of their oil industry? How dare he actually make a South American nation a real democracy? Imagine a Latin American country where 1% of the population doesn't own 99% of the wealth of the nation?
Where only 1% of the population receive a world-class education?
We were in Caracas and Margarita Island on vacation and paid 14 US cents a litre for BP gasoline.....and that was full serve at that.....
Posted by: Raymond | Mar 25, 2006 4:53:38 AM
Amnesty International's newest crusade highlights the damage created by official government homophobia. No federal marriage rights, no federal ENDA with special attention to transgendered populations, is the recipe for the kind of violence recorded by the organisation.
Listen, we may say that life imprisonment or long sentences or that executions are not part of the USA reality against LGBT citizens. That is true. However, the danger is more passive and more subtle. The government creates the spitballs, and the unbalanced throw them.
Moreover, you must accept the fact that in a nation of 300M plus - it is a fact that about 30M of your citizens are LGBT. That number is nearly the total population of Canada. Our LGBT population is about 3M.
Many rightwingnuts in your nation are embarked on a crusade to reverse ALL rights gained. They want your Supreme Court, now heavily right wing, to recriminalise all gay behaviours, including the misnamed "sodomy".
It may take our holocaust and the world giving us our own nation in order to make it safe there and everywhere for us.
Posted by: Raymond | Mar 25, 2006 5:02:13 AM
So is Morrissey "out," so to speak?
Posted by: Kevin | Mar 25, 2006 10:28:14 AM
'''so to speak, ever so subtly.....
Posted by: Raymond | Mar 25, 2006 2:08:17 PM