Lady Gaga to marry gays; Tea Party wants No Gays; Texas bans gay divorce; and Castro blames himself

The American entertainer Lady Gaga is a woman of many talents, and now she wants to add one – the ability to marry gay people on stage. To be able to do this, she is reportedly studying to become an ordained minister in California.

While Lady Gaga prepares to marry ‘em on stage, the Tea Party Movement in Ohio is planning to keep ‘em separate but equal. Gays that is. In fact, according to the email sent out to prospective candidates in the state, they seem somewhat obsessed with the gays (pdf). The organisation “Freedom Institute of Erie County” spends a lot of time decrying the moral outrage of equal protection under the laws in the United States.

Onward to Texas, where we find two kinds of people – steers and eternally married queers. Should the Tea Party Movement in Ohio not be able to stop Lady Gaga’s stage gay marrying, you can go to the long horn state to enjoy that gay divorce is illegal. Two Dallas men married in Massachusetts, where gay marriage is legal, can’t be divorced in the state, the 5th Texas court of Appeals ruled the other day.

And finally, the 84-year old Fidel Castro blames himself for ruining the gay scene in Havana during the 1970s. During those troubled times, gay people were locked up in labour camps and persecuted by the communist regime there.

Church splits over teh gays; Gay minister blasted; First gay kiss in long-time gay drama Modern Family; New gay show opens off-broadway

Lutherans never get much upset about things. They tend to sit still in church and beam quietly. But in North America the lutheran churchgoers have been positively fuming about teh gays, and it has led to the Lutheran Church splitting.

Now there is a North American Lutheran Church that will be true and proper and not devilish and blasphemous, unlike the Evangelical Lutheran Church. In effect, they won’t be allowing gays to spread their wicked wiles when they sit there beaming quietly.

Here at home the minister Crispin Blunt who came out of the closet earlier, is being blasted by the LGBT-charity Stonewall for claiming that teh gayness was wicked and devilish and blasphemous. Well, okay, maybe not in those exact terms, but he did vote against everything leading to more equality for us gay people, and he claimed that it was right to discriminate between “homosexual and heterosexual practices”

Speaking of homosexual practices, it is a curious fact of the entertainment industry that the show “Modern Family”, that features a gay couple, never does teh gay thing. No cuddles, no kissing, no argument about whose turn it is to go out with the rubbish. But, now finally, Modern Family is going to get into the “homosexual practices”. Yes, an episode with a kiss has been filmed. “It’s a very organic kiss. People are going to be very surprised when they see it,” said Jesse Tyler Ferguson to E! Online. Yes, I can imagine. The show’s only been running since September 2009 without a single one.

And if being teh gay with all these strange consequences, you can take a breather from the world domination games, the church splitting, and the politicking to go to a new show that will open off-Broadway “It Must Be Him” in New York. The new show stars the emmy-winning actor Peter Scolari and opens at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre on Wednesday.

Conservative minister comes out; another Tory minister will sue for outing; David Yost driven off Power Rangers set by homophobia

Following the previous coming out of the American conservative Ken Mehlman, the Tory MP for Reigate constituency here in the UK, Crispin Blunt, has come out of the closet. Earlier he announced that he was going to separate from his wife of 20 years and “come to terms” with his homosexuality. Mr Blunt is the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Prisons. Like his American counterpart, Mr Blunt has a chequered history in gay equality issues, with votes against the equalisation of age of consent and votes against gay adoptions. Mr Blunt is also the uncle of actress Emily Blunt.

Following Mr Blunts coming-out to a not so welcoming LGBT-community, another cabinet minister is considering legal action about gay-rumours about him. His position is, concerning threats to out him by bloggers, that he’s not buggering anyone and never has. Basically.

Buggering is dangerous, which the star of Power Rangers David Yost found out. The actor was basically driven off the show by the producers, actors and writers. In a video interview on the site linked, Yost explains how he was nearly driven to suicide by the others, before he walked off the set one day.

Gay spy murder; Matt Lucas sues tabloid; Sir Elton voted for; Politician not welcomed; and too much party at the Manchester Pride

The employers of James Bond, MI6 (or more correctly the Secret Intelligence Service as it is actually called officially) have become involved in a murder mystery. On of their employees, Gareth Williams, on loan from the GCHQ, was found murdered in his Pimlico apartment this week, and police are speculating in the media that a gay lover may be involved.

And while the media is salivating about James Bond, spies, and gay lovers, the comedian Matt Lucas has decided to take legal action against the tabloid Daily Mail over an article following the death of his civil partner that he says was a “very serious invasion of privacy and intrusion into grief it represented.”

While Lucas preps the lawyers, the British singer Elton John is, possibly, breaking out the champagne having been been voted for by the readers of Entertainment Weekly. What was voted for was ‘the most surprising duet’ ever. What was that? It was the one he did nearly ten years ago at the 2001 Grammy Awards when he sang with the US rapper Eminem.

And over in the states one man is possibly putting back the champagne into the fridge after his coming out was not received with the rapturous welcome he possibly envisaged. The conservative politician Ken Mehlman, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and aide to George Bush the elder, revealed that he was gay in the magazine The Atlantic. The LGBT community remembers that he was the leader of a party that during his stewardship put in deeply discriminatory laws over there.

But other people object to champagne, whether it’s in the fridge or not. Organisers of the 20th Manchester Pride were accused of dumbing down the celebrations because they focused on, um, the celebrations. A spokesman for the gay rights group “Reclaim the Scene” objects to how Machester Pride has focused on the partying, instead of focusing on the politics of it.

At the deep end of LGBT politics

There is a case to be made for having a sense of community among lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people. There is a strong sense of shared experience, and a strong sense of common problems. But there is also a danger of the community turning in on itself, and becoming insular and incestuous.

When the real life Brendan Teena was murdered in Humboldt, Nebraska in 1993 it was an as egregious attack as the one on Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming, in 1998. Teena was a transgender and Shepard was a gay man. Both were murdered under horrific circumstances that generated a lot of media coverage and public outcry.

It is a shared experience that spans the wide LGBT-community that certain segments of the population are willing to murder us in the most horrific ways. It is a phenomenon that is evident globally, as witnessed by the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho in London in 1999. Today the headlines tend to describe acts of this nature in countries in the Middle East, notably Iran that hangs gay people on a regular basis, and in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The murderers are the most extreme of the opposition arrayed against the LGBT-community, but there is a shade of grey from this extreme over to the open and acceptable side. That grey zone spans over proponents for legislation such as DOMA and Proposition 8 in the United States, and the separate legislation for gay “marriages” in the United Kingdom, the Civil Partnerships, as well as the current fight for adoption rights against the Catholic adoption agencies in the UK.

When I was a fresh out of the closet gay man so many years ago, I volunteered as a phone councillor for troubled gay teens that were trapped in their small communities and their tragic circumstances. Recurring themes were parental abuse, thoughts of suicide, depression, substance abuse, and a long litany of woes.

In light of all this, one of our instructions was to get the teens “into the community”. We were instructed to bring the kids into the ghetto where we could talk to them, give them role models, and protect them from their families or friends or environment. Or simply try to protect them from themselves. The power of community was immense, and benevolent.

The community had an evident worth in the shared experiences and the shared problems we all faced to a smaller or greater extent in our lives. The community could give protection, give counselling, and give medical help in that time of HIV and the ravages of AIDS.

Preservation and protection were the values of the community, while we struggled for equality, but as LGBT is making large strides on that side we are more and more often faced with a debate about protecting the community itself, instead of having the community to protect its members.

One organisation that appears to push this exclusionary view is the US literary website LAMBDA, who has been in the centre of a literary storm these last days when a writer called Victoria Brownstone attacked women that write romance novels with gay male relationships. One of her stated reasons for this was that straight women appropriated gay male relationships for sexual titillation.

As LGBT-people are winning the debate, another debate is simmering, and that is the question of whether using the new equality on a level footing with the rest of society is actually “heterosexual conformity”.

In queer philosophy there is this thing called hetero-normativity, which means that society as a whole conforms to heterosexuals in expectations planning and function of the society. In effect, at its simplest form, you are assumed to be a heterosexual until you tell otherwise, and society plans and acts as if everyone is in fact heterosexual, until told otherwise.

In this view, actually using the new equal footing with heterosexuals is submitting to the hetero norm, and therefore LGBT should resist using the equality and strive for exclusivity. What that means is that the gay community should preserve itself because the gay community should be separate, but equal, to the straight society.

We’re at the deep end of the LGBT-politics here and in these waters actually using say a same-sex marriage would be to conform to heterosexism. What LGBT-people have spent decades, if not centuries, for is, in fact, not acceptable in this light. It makes me wonder what it is we fight for. Isn’t it equality? Now that we have it, should we throw it away since it’s supposed to mean we conform?

No. Personally, I feel that there is a need for a gay community in that it is damned nice to go to a gay bar and talk to people that are like me. There is a value in not having to guess about a guy’s orientation at that bar, but to assume that a visitor to a gay bar is in fact gay or bisexual.

But the ambition, for me, is that in fifty years time no one will do to us what the murderers did to Brendan Teena and Matthew Shepard. The dream is that it would be unthinkable because gay people and straight people are not segregated into separate spheres of existence, or exclusivity if you will.

If that means that the LGBT-community will dissolve into a loose chain of services for specific needs, then that is a price I’m willing to pay, if it means that I’ll be considered not in light of my sex-partners gender, but in light of how I am as a human being. Equality is more important than the community. I’d rather live my life as I see fit in a world where gayness is completely irrelevant to people, and gayness is viewed the same as straightness, than having an LGBT-community just for the sake of having an LGBT-community.

Welcome to the ghetto

I’m a gay man, and one of the things I do is to write fiction. I write in a genre called contemporary or mainstream. It’s a bit blurred what that actually means. My subject matters tend to be about this time, about the real world, about some social problem. My characters tend to be straight, white youth.

I am wrong in choosing these subject matters because an American organisation feels thusly about writers working with characters beyond their own sexual orientation. Bolding below is mine.

In a world where Lisbeth Salander is tearing up the bestseller list with her clunky motorcycle boots and her refusal to fit neatly into the category of gay or straight, it seems the revival of queer sensibilities has come upon us. This is something that the expanding genre of Male/Male fiction tackles head on. Although these novels are described as gay historical fiction they are (as the press release details) “written primarily – but not exclusively – for women”. This complicates how M/M fits into the genre of LGBT fiction. How does a genre of fiction that is exclusively centered around homosexual love, and largely written by and for explicitly straight writers and readers challenge the typical notion of what LGBT fiction is? Perhaps more significantly, how does it problematize the mutual exclusivity of homosexuality and heterosexuality?

A while back the gay entertainment site AfterElton.com wrote an absolutely brilliant article about slash fiction, and I recommend that you go and read it here. Brent Hartinger describes how slash fiction writers have made it possible for gay characters to exist on television in the first place, and how slash fiction writers have enlarged the audience pool by normalising gay male relationships. Yes, he’s saying that those badly written Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy stories actually made it normal for a large segment of the population to relate to gay characters, and I think he is right.

Then go and read the articles that gave rise to the one I linked at the top of this post: this, this and this. All of these articles are a very strange attack on women writing M/M romances. That is romances featuring gay men rather than being about ‘boy meets girl’. Those three articles set emotions in high gear among writers like LA Witt, and her “rant” can be read here. Another can be read here.

It all boils down to the question of whether straight women can write authentically about gay men, and whether they should be allowed to. Never mind that the two women in the Out-article aren’t actually straight. What the articles in LAMBDA, Out and on Gawker question is a fundamental question of whether those outside the LGBT-community should be allowed to write LGBT-fiction. LAMBDA doesn’t think they should, and they have barred straight writers from competing in their awards.

What they are saying is that we should live in the ghetto and that people who write about our lives without living in the ghetto should be shamed from doing so. This of course also invalidates all my writing, because by their reasoning, how can I write about heterosexual youth with social problems?

LAMBDA is propagating a ‘separate but equal’-theory that should be fought anywhere and anytime. It was not right in the sixties, and it is not right now. Lambda is not the Malcolm X:s of the gay community. I, as a gay man in England, will continue to write what I damn well please, and I hope the women and men writing M/M romances continue to do so, regardless of whether they are straight gay or bisexual.

Glee for Scooch; Emma Thompson upset Isle of Wight; Gay man is upset too; Stephen Fry joins Norwich City; Will Young wins

My gay wiring got a bit of a short circuit when I read that Reading Pride – which takes place in September – will feature the group Scooch performing hits from the TV show Glee. A mix of Eurovision and musical theatre, in other words, and it may be too much for a gay man to bear. It seems like a planned joke.

And if it’s a joke, maybe it will fall as flat with the queers of Reading as Emma Thompson’s joke on The Late Show in the states did with the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight. She commented on the island with “Oh, so they stone homosexuals there? Nice. I think they are still allowed to flog them, which of course some of them enjoy.” This was not taken in a spirit of the Jest by the people of Isle of Wight, who got upset.

Spreading the misery around, the gay journalist Michaelangelo Signorile is upset too because national media in the US has described Judge Vaughn Walker as gay. Signorile said that the description of Walker was “a testament to how easily the media is manipulated by the right into doing things about which editors and reporters claim to be staunchly opposed.” What they are, supposedly, opposed to is outing.

A gay man that is not upset, hopefully, is the British writer and comedian Stephen Fry, who is joining the board of british football club Norwich City. “Truly this is one of the most exciting days of my life and I am as proud and pleased as I could be.”, Fry said in response to it all. So no, he doesn’t appear to be upset. Hopefully. Unless his joining the board will give him depression for not being picked as a member of the first team. Time will tell.

And as if that’s not enough, the gay singer Will Young has been voted Best Role Model for Gay Young People this year. If the title hasn’t left your tongue in knots, you will undoubtedly be pleased about that, and that he won by 58% in a poll arranged by the UK gay charity Stonewall. And that of course also makes me happy because I can include a shirtless Will Young in this post.

George Michael charged again; Anti-gay backtracking; Daniel Radcliffe talks nice; and Abe Lincoln for President

Now, George Michael is getting used to the attentions of the police, because he was recently caught again driving under the influence, and smashing into a shop with his car. At the same time he smashed into the headlines again, with another arrest. Like the site AfterElton.com says: “it seems he’s developed a fetisch for getting arrested.”

But George Michael isn’t the only one with a PR problem. Remember the ruckus last week over Judge Vaughn Walkers ruling that Californias Proposition 8, banning same-sex marriage in the state, was unconstitutional? Today, as the temporary stay on same-sex wedding bells chiming all over the state was lifted, a couple of anti-gay personages were busy backtracking. One was the american conservative commentator Glen Beck and the other was the Australian senate candidate Wendy Francis.

Cause for celebrations all around, in other words. Which brings us over to more somber political news concerning one of the forefather of the present United States, Abraham Lincoln. If you’re in NewYork, and feel like celebrating in the spirit of it all, you can go and watch “Abraham Lincoln’s Big, Gay Dance Party” which opens in New York.

And finally, Daniel Radcliffe of Harry Potter fame, talks nice about gay people in Out magazine as he is set to star in a new Broadway play called ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying‘, which will open in March next year.

Vicar banned from fostering, sunny prides, and “gay marriage is child abuse”

A former Anglican priest in Blackburn wanted to become foster parents, but when they said “we don’t want any gay couples in our house” the council rejected their application and banned them from fostering.

The former vicar is appealing the decision, because he says that “it is vital that as Christians we are allowed to live out our faith in public and not be eliminated from this kind of vital community work due to oppressive equality legislation”. Right, equality is oppressive and is bad for morals, hear.

If that makes you want to go and grab a drink, or a bottle, you could have headed to Brighton this last week for the biggest Pride ever there. More than 160.000 people showed up for the fun times there. And the weather was nice too!

And if you think that’s too crowded, Liverpool had its Pride too, where 21 thousand people turned up. There they enjoyed a march and a party. Or, if you still are annoyed with the crowds, you could have gone and drunk grave ale over Worcester Pride which was cancelled due to lack of sponsoring.

If you still haven’t found that drink, the strong one, after the vicar things, you might want to consider just ditching the going out and drink after shave when you read Australian Senate candidate Wendy Francis views on gay marriage.  The Queensland politician said gay marriage was “child abuse” and that legalizing gay marriage was akin to “legalizing child abuse.”

When the leopard changed his spots

In a presentation thread I relayed the absurdity that was my coming out process, including what I consider to be a pretty romantic end to my life in the closet. My continued life as a gay man is no less absurd, in the beginning, and I’d thought I’d use that to set up another debate here for you. Please bear with me through a wall of text for it all to be clear…

When you emerge from that cocoon of heterosexism that is called the closet, and bloom into the bright butterfly that is known as ‘the out of the closet gay man’ it is easy to tread wrong.

Now, it turned out that my prince charming, the one that shocked me out of the closet, and who kissed that sleeping beauty that was me, apparently worked on commission.

Before I had recorded his phone number in my mobile, he was climbing up the castle wall ivy to deflower another someone. Paul, the photographer. And there I was – out and about, without the possibility of crawling back into the closet.

It would be hard crawl back into pretence of heterosexism when you had spent the last few hours of a New Year’s Eve party sucking another man’s face off. Publically. It is a bit hard to explain away to co-workers, I think. I never tried, so I can’t of course be sure about that.

I learned a very important lesson though. And it is this: when you have romped through a couple of days of wanton abandon, feeling care free and complete for the first time in your life, remember to bring sunscreen.

You see, life in the sun, outside the closet, can give you sunburn. Too much immediate exposure to the glittering new life can, at worst, give you a bad case of melanoma. At best, you’ll whinge a lot, or possibly even cringe a lot as you remember what you actually did during that phase.

This is what happened to me.

What does a somewhat geeky lad of twenty five do when he comes out of the closet, carrying all those prejudices and preconceptions about how gay people should be? You’re right, he tries to live up to every single one of them. I mean, if you’re gay, act gay. Right?

Roger that. So, over a few weeks or so, the spotty geek that watched too much Babylon 5 and Star trek TNG for his own good transformed to a Richard Simmons on amphetamines. It was not a pretty sight. But I was gay. That repressed little faggot in me blossomed into full glorious bloom, and it was spectacular. So my co-workers and friends – who didn’t run away screaming – told me later.

That phase lasted about… three weeks. In that time I had sashayed down the sidewalk like a screaming clueless Carson Kressley without a fashion sense. I signed up for everything that dealt with gay stuff. I cringe thinking about it.

Every gay man needs a stereotypical down to earth female friend that can give you a hard slap in the face when it is warranted. Lena was that for me, and she really did slap me. So, in a matter of about three weeks or a month I went from being kissed to being slapped.

When you meet me today, there is precious little of that flamboyant drama queen left, and it would be hard to single me out from the humdrum of commonality that is the average middle aged white man. I know, I grieve for it, but that is how it is.

But the presentation got me thinking, and now I thought I’d give the pay off for reading all this text. If you haven’t, what are you doing here? Go back to the start!

It’s about truthfulness, it’s about you. I would argue that both my closet days and my days as an helium fuelled projectile against hetero privilege was equally faked. That frightened young man that spent his life fussing about The Big Secret, as well as the man that stood outside the closet door was in essence the same. A facade. It was the chameleon that just changed its skin pattern for a new background.

I didn’t know anything about being gay when I came out, and only experience could tell me. And here’s the debating point I would like to pose to you. How much did the chameleon inside you, if there was one, make you adopt an equally forged exterior? Or didn’t it?