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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Marriages, Gay Prince and homophobia in Iraq

After the gay marriage ruling in the US, the debate seems to be picking up in the UK as the one half of the ruling coalition, the Liberal Democrats, will vote on whether to work for gay marriages or not at the party’s upcoming conference in Liverpool next month. If the party votes for full gay rights, it could annoy both the religiously conservative methodist wing of the party as well as their coalition partners in the Tory party, even though the leader of the tories are on record supporting the idea.

Moving from the UK to India, we learn that this country’s bonny gay prince Manvendra Singh Gohil has launched two magazines for India’s somwhat starved gay population. One is a relaunch for “people who love women” and the other is for “people who love men”. The gay male magazine promises to be about fashion, lifestyle, and fun – with a sprinkling of sex advice and health issues. Things appear to normalize fast in India, it appears, as the country only decriminalized homosexuality last year, in 2009.

On the move again to another part of the world, we learn that Iraqi LGBT have annouced that they have launched a web site in the UK for that country’s lgbt-people. While being gay has been decriminalized in the country, the fabulous people there still face endemic homophobia characterized by harassment, violent and honour killings. Despite having decriminalized homosexuality, police regularly perform raids against gays and lesbians.

Gay marriage around the world

California is a US state known for its earthquakes. One of them took place in the week that went by, but this time it was a legal earthquake. San Francisco didn’t fall into the sea.

I am of course talking about the ruling from Chief U.S. Judge Vaughn Walker where he declared that the state’s ban on gay marriage was unconstitutional on equal protection grounds. That has got the opposition to gay marriage to throw a hizzy fit, to use a quaint expression of one of my internet friends. They are now seeking to have Mr Walker impeached.

I can understand why. In the 136-page ruling, Mr Walker demolished all the propaganda we have heard over these last decades with a clear and concise logic. We also note that the proponents for the ban failed to provide an adequate legal defence of the ban, calling only two witnesses who ended up contradicting each other, and who was ruled to be unreliable.

As overturning the ruling requires that the proponents demolish the judge’s findings, I can see why they would – after the utter annihilation of their rhetoric in the ruling – try to demolish the character of the judge instead.

But California is not the only place to fret about gay marriages. Catholic Mexico City has been in the news too today about the matter. The Mexican Supreme court ruled today that the city’s law permitting gay marriage was indeed constitutional.

One of the things in the ruling was the determination that civil unions, and thus indeed our civil partnerships, were second class arrangements. They were designed to make opposite sex-relationships superior to same-sex ones. I wish politicians on this side of the pond would take a leaf from that book, and have another look at our own laws. Why is it that our civil partnerships can’t be performed in a church? It is because they are second class arrangements meant to make heterosexual marriages superior to ours.

Slutty men, parents, comings out and slash and burn in Nottingham

• The guys over at AfterElton.com pointed out an interesting thing in a their agony aunt-column ‘Pigeon Guts’. The question was about slutty gay men and barebacking. Barebacking is a filthy thing that’s come into the community over the last years, maybe as a backlash to the safe sex culture we had in the midst of the AIDS-crisis during the 80s and early nineties.And it is a good point, because HIV and AIDS are still a very real danger in the community. Just a few days ago it was revealed that 1 in 7 gay men on the London club scene carries the virus. To throw in a fetisch about barebacking is a disaster. The producers of adult entertainment are taking a huge gamble with people’s lives, and that goes from venues like Gay.com to Saunas to outright porn.

• Before the states even have marriage equality, they are gearing up for the next fight, which is gay adoptions. I’m not at all sure about the prospect for gay marriage across the pond, and think the fight there will continue for a long while yet. Hopefully the States will join the 21st century and get gay marriages.

• Former child star Sara Gilbert, who played in Roseanne and Will & Grace has come out of the closet.

• Over here in the UK it is slash and burn time as it comes to budgets, and one of the groups to feel the pinch is Council for Equality and Human Rights, Nottingham and Notts. It didn’t fulfill its role, and will see its funding of £300,000 axed over the next three years.