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.

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.