Lies, damned lies, and statistics

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” This quote was attributed to Benjamin Disraeli by Mark Twain, and Disraeli is as good an originator as any, even though no evidence exist that Disraeli ever said it.

The quote does however ring in my ears when I read the reporting on the British Office for National Statistic’s recent survey of about 250000 Britons concerning their households.

The survey has come to the astonishing conclusion that there are a combined number of gay and bisexuals of 1.5%. An earlier 2004 survey conducted by the Treasury spoke of between 5-7 percent.

Liberal Democrats for gay marriage; LGBT charity AGAINST gay marriage

The British party The Liberal Democrats, one half of the ruling coalition, today adopted same-sex marriage at its party conference in Liverpool, so hopefully gay people will be able to tie the knot in a few years, unless the Tory right refuses.

In a strange twist, the biggest LGBT-charity in the UK, Stonewall, seems to have come out against same-sex marriage. A report at PinkNews say that the chairman of the Equality-division views same-sex marriage as too expensive, and puts the tab at £5bn.

People are naturally outraged by this, and everyone I’ve spoken to about it directs quite a bit of ire against the organisation. I have yet to find one that shares Stonewall’s strange view on equality under the laws.

A Queer Paradise of Invisible Gays

When you talk about queer rights in places like certain parts of the United States, there’s a chance that Sweden – among some other European nations – will be held up as an ideal to emulate.

In Sweden the gays have it good. Right?

The fight is largely won, which has brought the country into the sights of Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas, who operate the site God Hates Sweden.

Gaga gags on gay ban; US military nurse wants job back; the world will end; homosexuality will be legal; and B&Bs won’t let you

Lady Gaga not only offers the opportunity to be creative with headlines, but she is also out there to fight for our equal rights. Earlier she announced she would become a priest in order to marry gays on stage. Now she has rallied against the US ban on gays in the military.

If she does gag, then former Major Margaret Witt might be able to help. She’s a lesbian who lost her job in the US military when they found out that she was indeed gay. Now she wants her job back, and she’s gone to court to get it.

But if she does, get it back I mean, the world will descend into anarchy and chaos, and little children will possibly cry. That’s what the religious right in the US is asserting. As if that was new.

Thought if the world is ending because of teh gays, they might want to have a little chat with republican state senator John Brueggeman in Montana who wants to bring Montana into the 21st century by removing language from the Montana laws that forbids homosexuality.

And if jobs in the US military, or the romp in Montana, is too much of an effort and you want to get away to, say, a B&B in the UK you should know that 13 percent of Bed & Breakfasts in the country won’t let you sleep in the same bed as your partner.

German minister marries man; Stephen Fry is part gay; Pope beatifys Brit; Cricketer Jimmy Anderson gets naked; and russian gay activist kidnapped

The blog has been so serious for a bit now, in addition to me being AWOL in Sweden, so here’s a look at what’s going on around the world and in England.

Remember a couple of weeks back when it seemed that one Tory minister per day was walking out of the closet, or tumbling out of it as the case may be? Germany is way more cool and efficient about that, because there the openly gay foreign minister Guido Westerwelle has married his male sweetheart Michael Mronz.

Whether Stephen Fry wants to marry or not, I can not say. He is possibly to preoccupied with finding clever things to write on Twitter. However, this gay thing is not all that is him, he claims. In fact, he is only 90 percent gay now. What the remaining ten percent of him is, I do not know.

That is possibly more, or possibly less, than John Henry Newman. Never heard of him, have you? Neither had I until this day, but apparently the pope’s visit to the UK was all a ruse. He was in fact here to beatify Newman. Some think it’s a conspiracy – you know, to make the “moral wasteland” that is the UK rise from its “third world” status by having a proper English man as a saint.

But cricket player Jimmy Anderson is not a saint, nor is he getting married, but he is getting naked to prove a point. He wants to show that cricket isn’t a stuffy incomprehensible sport, so he sheds his threads in an upcoming issue of Attitude magazine. Looking at the picture above, I’m not entirely sure I want to miss out on that particular issue.

And whether it is associated with anything of the above or not, the conspiracy theorists can argue, but the Russian gay rights activist Nikolai Alekseev says he was kidnapped and possibly drugged by the Russian government. Maybe it was to prevent him marrying, being beatified, or even getting naked. Or it was more serious, like the Russian government pressuring him to drop his case before the European court of Human Rights.

There’s nowt so queer as Sweden

Let’s first of all be honest and admit that there are few countries on earth that are better to be gay in than Sweden.

Okay, they pay filthy high taxes, but at least they can marry whoever they want, and if they want a kid they can stomp down to an adoption agency and apply for one.

Not every issue has been solved. Lesbians still face the fact that if you’re inseminated, your spouse doesn’t automatically become the parent. Transgender people need to sterilize themselves before they can switch gender legally.

Such issues still remain to be solved, but there is no real fear that the new government that was elected on Sunday would act against it.

That does not, however, stop the same election results from being very worrying from an LGBT perspective.

The ruling Conservative-Liberal alliance (C+M+FP+KD in the diagram) won the election, and the Labour-Socialist-Green (S+V+MP) alliance lost it. That about sums it up.

The only part of the so called Red-green coalition that improved its lot were the greens, that advanced by two percentage points, compared to four years ago.

But a Conservative-Liberal win is not a disaster for Swedish LGBT-rights. It was, after all, the Conservative-Liberal alliance that ushered in same-sex marriages in the last session of parliament.

In Sweden, Conservative does not necessarily mean anti-gay. There are some elements of anti-gay among the Conservatives, of curse, but they tend to reside in the miniscule Christian Democrats with around 5 percent of the vote.

When the same-sex marriage vote was up, even the coalition partners ignored them and just voted the law through anyway. Nobody cares for the anti-gay in Sweden.

Labour made its absolutely worst election since the introduction of the popular vote. You have to go back to 1914 to find similar numbers for the once dominant party of Swedish politics.

This is the second consecutive election that the Social Democrats (Labour) has lost a big share of its vote. In 2006 they fell to about 35 percent of the vote. This time they fell to just shy of 31 percent.

For a party that just a decade ago was assured a forty percent share, or more, of the popular vote it’s a disaster. For a party that a decade ago saw a Conservative party hover around 15% in the polls, it is a dire tragedy.

Now the Conservatives are as big as Labour. And that stings deep in every Social Democrat, who have not accustomed themselves to being a party among others.

And if that wasn’t enough, with the introduction of a polished made-over neo-Nazi party the Sweden Democrats, Labour loses one of its big ambitions. Their stated aim was to keep he Sweden Democrats out of power.

The Sweden Democrats are no boon to the government, because the government alliance captured just 172 of the needed 175 seats in the parliament.

The Sweden Democrats gained 20 seats on Sunday, and the situation for continued governance without relying on the racists seem uncertain, although every other party has publically stated that they want nothing to do with the newcomers.

The concept of a hung parliament is on everyones minds in Sweden now, and it’s like having the BNP standing between the UK Labour and the Tories in the last election.

Not an enviable position for the government, and not an enviable position for LGBT because as a racist populist party, they are of course also raging homophobes.

The ignorable Christian Democrats had no influence on LGBT-issues in the previous session because they were so small. There was an overwhelming parliamentary support for the LGBT-issues.

Now, the anti-gay side has increased, and more than doubled. Instead of an ignorable five percent of the chamber, the anti-gay fringe has swelled to over 11 percent.

That could be all that is needed for our issues to grind to a staggering halt for the next four years. And if worst comes to worst, Sweden could degrade from being the ideal.

Time will tell.

Naked games

Awesome little short that I couldn’t keep from you. I’ve been looking at gays on TV and in film lately, and stumbled on this.

No LGBT in Swedish election

So, as I write this, the polling stations in Sweden are about to close, and soon we will be presented with an estimate of how it will turn out by the publically financed Swedish Television.

To sum it up, there have been no focus at all on LGBT issues in the election, with one little caveat. The situation for LGBT-people have not come at all in this election that have been dominated by jobs, the economy and the state of the welfare state.

The caveat is that the polished up neo-nazi party Sweden Democrats might get parliamentary representation for the first time, and if that happens LGBT might face difficulties in the next session of parliament.

The estimate has just been published even as I write this. The labour bloc, consisting of Labour, the Left Party (former communists) and the green party is estimated to get 45,1 percent. The conservative-liberal block, which consists of the Conservatives, the two liberal parties, and the Christian Democrats  is estimated to get 49,1 %.

The Sweden Democrats are expected to get 4,6%, and therefore seems to squeak into parliament. The limit is 4%.

Who wants to live forever?

I got into an argument with a friend on MSN about the question of HIV in the gay community, and the fetischization of bare-backing among many gay men. Ironically enough, and this is true, Queen’s ‘Who wants to live forever’ was playing on spotify at the time.

As has been reported on this blog earlier London’s club scene is a dangerous place if you’re unwary. One in seven men you meet is going to be HIV positive.

So, if you go out and try to find a man for the night, I might feel like Harry Callahan in the Dirty Harry movies, pointing a gun at you with one round in the chamber. I can make a little speech there:

– I know what you’re thinking. "Did he wear a condom last time or not? Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is HIV, the most devastating disease to have ever hit the gay community, the bubonic plague of queers, and would blow your life clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?

After fighting the disease for thirty years it is easy to understand why people are battle weary, and why many people have given in, but it is very hard to understand why the Russian roulette of bare-backing have come to be fetischized by elements in the gay community.

It is also hard to understand why serious participants in the community are not railing against this fetischization, but keep quiet about it and even ignore it. It is hard to understand why clubs and venues cash in on it.

It is a lie that the disease is manageable. It is not. It is a virus, and there is no cure, and even though the medication for now keeps it in check viral particles in the body survive. The modern medicines bring down HIV particles to less than half a million particles in a full grown man, of to less than 75 copies per milliliter of blood.

If those viral particles spread resistance to the medication will spread. If the resistance spread we will get back to how it was in the early nineties and late eighties, where every gay man will bury two or three of their friend per month. Have you seen movies of the bubonic plague of the middle ages? That’s how it was back then.

Do we want those days back? If not, it is time for pressure to be put on the fetischization of bare-backing. It is a too dangerous a practice to be ignored, and turned a blind eye to.

Tory gay squirming continues; Ed Milliband LGBT-gay’s choice; Ulster Unionist won’t go in Pride Parade; and Reading Pride biggest ever

It’s been a very strange week for the tories here in the UK when they’ve been wallowing in gayness, or suspected gayness. The fallout continues with the foreign secretary William Hague, and his supposed gayness. His extraordinary response to the rumours have come under attack from his own, and many people are shaking their heads at this storm in a tea-cup.

On the other side of the political spectrum it is a more sedate affair where people speculate who is the best candidate for gay labour members, and it seems that Ed Milliband is the current favourite there. The gay news site PinkNews polled its members and found that 42% of identified labour voters preferred Ed Milliband.

And the more sedate political debate continues in Northern Ireland, but from the opposite view of the Labour one. There the Ulster Unionists are choosing between the traditionalist Tom Elliot and the more liberal Basil McCrea. Mr Elliot will give those gays the least, and will certainly not attend either the Gaelic Games (GAA) or the gay pride parades.

And speaking of Pride, Reading Pride was reportedly the biggest ever with 12000 participants, according to the organisers.