US names first-ever envoy for gay rights

Randy Berry will advocate for LGBTI rights globally

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darrenw

www.gaystarnews.com/article/us-names-first-ever-envoy-gay-rights240215

Was NPH Better Than Rock Hudson? 8 LGBT Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony Hosts

Are gays made to host big, flashy awards shows? Looks that way.

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Leslie Dobbins

www.advocate.com/politics/media/2015/02/23/was-nph-better-rock-hudson-8-lgbt-emmy-grammy-oscar-tony-hosts

Half-Million Supporters Demand Pardon For Persecuted Gay Men Day After Graham Moore's Oscar Speech
On the heels of screenwriter Graham Moore’s moving Oscars speech for his role in creating “The Imitation Game,” the family of the film’s protagonist, late mathematician Alan Turing, is demanding justice.

More than 60 years after their British ancestor died, the family is fighting for others who, like Turing, experienced mistreatment because of their sexual orientation.

As AFP reported, Turing’s great-nephew, great-niece and great-niece’s son handed over a petition with more than 523,000 signatures to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s office on Monday. The Change.org initiative demanded the British government pardon roughly 49,000 men who, like Turing, were convicted under the country’s former “gross indecency” law that banned gay relations. Turing’s “crime” was pardoned in 2013 by Queen Elizabeth II, but his family wants others to reap the same justice.

The Turing family hands over 520k+ petition signatures to 10 Downing Street in London. t.co/IgcAG1c8m9 t.co/xTLDaZ5ET7

— Change.org (@Change) February 23, 2015

Turing — a computer scientist who helped crack the German naval code during World War II, leading to a breakthrough against the Nazis — died by suicide in 1954. Two years prior, he’d been convicted of “gross indecency” with a 19-year-old man and chose chemical castration instead of serving jail time.

Moore — who wrote the 2014 film that tells the story of Turing’s contributions during World War II — opened up about his personal experiences dealing with depression on Sunday while accepting the Oscar for best adapted screenplay.

“I tried to commit suicide at 16 and now I’m standing here,” he said. “I would like for this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she doesn’t fit in anywhere. You do. Stay weird. Stay different, and then when it’s your turn and you are standing on this stage please pass the same message along.”

Turing’s great-niece, Rachel Barnes, spoke out about why she was fighting for the men who’d been persecuted, saying it defied reason to only pardon her relative while so many others did nothing wrong.

“I consider it to be fair and just that everybody who was convicted under the gross indecency law is given a pardon,” she said, according to The Guardian. “It is illogical that my great-uncle has been the only one to be pardoned when so many were convicted of the same crime. I feel sure that Alan Turing would have also wanted justice for everybody.”

Benedict Cumberbatch, who was nominated for an Oscar for portraying Turing in the film, also joined the call for action last month.

“Alan Turing was not only prosecuted, but quite arguably persuaded to end his own life early, by a society who called him a criminal for simply seeking out the love he deserved, as all human beings do,” he wrote in an email to The Hollywood Reporter. “Sixty years later, that same government claimed to ‘forgive’ him by pardoning him. I find this deplorable, because Turing’s actions did not warrant forgiveness — theirs did — and the 49,000 other prosecuted men deserve the same.”

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www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/23/graham-moore-alan-turing-petition_n_6736330.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Gay NFL draft pick Michael Sam to compete on ABC's Dancing With the Stars

Unable to compete in NFL last season, Sam will compete for Mirror Ball Trophy

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gregh

www.gaystarnews.com/article/gay-nfl-draft-pick-michael-sam-compete-abcs-dancing-stars230215

What To Watch This Week On TV: Finales for 'Parks' and 'Murder'

Bobby Hankinson

www.towleroad.com/2015/02/what-to-watch-this-week-on-tv-finales-for-parks-and-murder.html

WATCH: Most Trans Europeans Face 'Nightmare' of Forced Sterilization, Divorce

Transgender Europe gives offers an insider look at the medical and administrative ‘nightmare’ many trans Europeans still face in order to obtain accurate legal identification.

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Mitch Kellaway

www.advocate.com/politics/transgender/2015/02/23/watch-most-trans-europeans-face-nightmare-forced-sterilization-divor

On William Friedkin's <i>Cruising</i>, 35 Years On
In the days when obscure movies could only be found by buying expensive foreign DVD copies on Amazon, or sourcing badly burned bootleg copies at flea markets, I discovered William Freidkin’s 1980 film Cruising.

It starred Al Pacino as a undercover cop who goes into New York’s (apparently) dangerous and seedy gay underworld — taken from a script written by Friedkin himself. The film had a storyline outlined on Wikipedia that can only be described as salacious and lurid. The narrative naturally beguiled my 16-year-old closeted self, and added to my own internet cruising for doses of gay culture before regularly deleting the browsing history.

With all of Wikipedia’s mentions of leather, gay sex and the seedy underground, I knew I had to source a copy of it somewhere — and a surreptitious Amazon buy with my mom’s Visa card did the trick. (She thought the purchase was to track down a school book for English, otherwise unavailable in Australia.)

I was lucky one afternoon when I caught the postman and was able to sneak out the film from its box and replace it with a well-thumbed poetry book. I flew down to my bedroom with the copy of Cruising to read the back cover about the excess of poppers, handkerchiefs and hirsute bodies that would adorn this controversial film.

For those unfamiliar with Cruising, there is an immense amount of notoriety (and campness) that circulates around even up until today. At the time of its release, the film gave a dangerously negative and fiercely homophobic representation of gay men, portraying us as murderous, anti-social and filled with self-destructive impulses.

It also offered up a rare glimpse of what Hollywood thought of gay male sex in the late 1970s. In darkened, harnessed and popper-fuelled sexual exchanges, gay men were seen to live out their sexual impulses, as they dressed in too much leather and would hide out in meatpacking warehouses and dark underground basements.

Cruising sees Al Pacino’s everyman character Steve Burns enlisted by the lead detective of a murder case to go undercover into New York’s gay leather sex scene after a string of killings take place on gay men in the leather scene. While cruising through the bars and warehouses, Pacino (naturally) experiences a crisis of his masculinity as his attempt to emulate the lifestyle of a gay man. This leads to self-doubt and an identity crisis, which sees him almost lose his girlfriend and his (straight) self-knowledge. (Poor Pacino!)

What made this film so controversial at the time was its pathologization of gay men — especially given the murderer at the centre is apparently a closeted homosexual. The film engages in the often-used cinematic and literary trope of the closet (where the murderer hides his gay leather/murderous dark identity inside a dilapidated white cupboard).

The larger gay community is treated with distance and curiosity by Friedkin, mostly represented as an anti-social, violent and unstable cohort far more interested in sex and drugs and booze than in pride marches and communal camaraderie.

35 years on, as damning as Cruising remains as an artefact of the “celluloid closet” there is a camp pleasure to be gained from watching it. Although at 16 I was hungry to see more frank representations of sex and gay male culture on the big screen, watching Cruising was a demoralizing — though laughable — experience.

The film’s camp quality is mostly derived from its bizarre negotiation of Al Pacino’s character’s straightness and masculinity within the gay leather scene. Evidently what interested Friedkin — since on top of directing the movie he also wrote its abysmal screenplay — was the idea of manliness and its articulation in the heterosexual and homosexual spheres respectively.

In a fantastically absurd scene by today’s standards, Al Pacino (playing the undercover queer) and his faux-homosexual lover are dragged into the local precinct to be grilled about the string of murderers that have been taking place. The police mistake the sting Pacino has set-up between himself and the boy he took home with him, after a walkie-talkie fails and they take the muffled noises from inside an apartment as Pacino about to be murdered.

With Pacino in on the act, the cops play out (good cop/bad cop) before we see a naked muscular black man donning a cowboy hat straddle in and smack Pacino right in the face, throwing him to the floor. Because neither are confessing to any involvement in the murders, the police must bring in the heavy guns to bully a confession out.

The obvious tact being that Pacino is to be assaulted in the question room to drive out a confession from his terrified gay male companion. As the black assailant side steps out (with his ass cheeks hanging firmly in a jockstrap) the scene becomes even more ridiculous when Pacino, recovering from his punch, then verbally attacks the body-builder and flings his cowboy hat out of the window.

Friedkin’s interest in staging such a contrived (sagging) scene might be easily explained by the claim that this was standard police practice in the 1980s. But you might interpret this moment (as I know do) as Friedkin’s attempt to lift the film’s grim and homophobic energy in the guise of this ridiculous and bizarre fracas.

Many at the time of its release condemned the film for its inherent homophobia, including the gay community as Cruising told the world that gay men are killers, are killed or can only be characterized by their obsession in sex and hedonism. 35 years on, we can reassess the film’s bizarre and pathological representation of gay men as it remains an antiquated artefact of Hollwood’s own “celluloid closet”.

Thanks to the pleasures of camp readings, we can also savour Pacino’s bad performance as an undercover cop with masculinity problems, while revelling in the knowledge that Friedkin’s decision to make this film singlehandedly killed his career.

www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-smith/on-william-friedkins-crui_b_6710286.html?utm_hp_ref=gay-voices&ir=Gay+Voices

Carson Kressley used to think being gay would hold him back – he was so wrong

‘The thing that I thought was my Achilles heel wound up being the thing that made me successful’

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gregh

www.gaystarnews.com/article/carson-kressley-used-think-bveing-gay-would-hold-him-back-he-was-wrong230215

Arkansas Lawmaker Goes Against Own Principle, Supports SB202

In an interview on Friday, Arkansas State Representative Charlie Collins noted he had concerns about Senate Bill 202, which would prohibit municipalities from enacting non-discrimination ordinances that protect LGBT people.
HRC.org

www.hrc.org/blog/entry/arkansas-lawmaker-goes-against-own-principle-supports-sb202?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed

Straight Guy Accidentally Visits Gay Bathhouse, Freaks Out, Turns To The Internet For Advice

“First off, I am happily married with a kid, and I’m completely naive,” begins one overcompensating Reddit user in a post filed in the “Today I Fucked Up” forum.

The anonymous family man’s chosen handle should be enough to tell where this story is headed — “not-gay-throwaway.”

So how exactly did he “fuck up?”

“I have back problems. Once and a while it gets really bad and sometimes the only way to relieve my pain is by using a jacuzzi. I don’t own one. It was really killing me today. So I looked around for a spa with a jacuzzi. I find one.”

Who doesn’t enjoy a nice rejuvenating soak? Innocent enough.

“Go in pay the money. Everything seems cool. Take off my clothes put a towel around my waist, wash and get in the jacuzzi. I’m feeling relaxed, and back is feeling much better. I decide to have a look around. There’s a sauna room. It’s completely dark, but I think, ‘Hey. I hate bright lights when I’m trying to relax.’”

You know who else hates bright lights? People hooking up in public spaces. Like a bathhouse. But OK, if he’s really as naive as he says he is, we’re going to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“So I go into the sauna because I love the heat. Big mistake. It was dark for a reason. Some dude is giving another dude a blowjob while another guy was watching.”

And here’s where things starts to derail. OK, so you’ve found yourself in a gay bathhouse — we can certainly see how that would be a bit alarming. He does (or at least he says he does) what you’d next expect — foregoes a shower and hightails it out of there.

But what should have been the end of the story only to become a punchline after a few drinks is only the beginning.

Riddled with guilt, not-gay-throwaway doesn’t know how to cope with what he’s done. Which, if we’re keeping score by his record, is absolutely nothing.

He writes, “I’m all freaked out now. My family would probably disown me if there was even a rumor that I went into a gay bath house while being married. My face is on all the cameras outside the building. I don’t think I’ll ever tell my wife. But I’m worried one day that a picture will show up somewhere of me going into a gay bath house.”

Seems to us like maybe not-gay is worrying a little too much about this. If it were really as honest a mistake as he reports, what’s all this talk of being disowned? It sounds like this spa wasn’t necessarily a gay bathhouse, but more like a cruising ground, and so what if he mistakingly stumbled into it for a few brief moments? Anything else you’d like to get off your chest, not-gay?

Following the advice he got on Reddit, he eventually did tell his wife, who of course did not disown him. She wasn’t even upset (duh), and actually made a joke of the situation, asking him, “Did anyone have a better looking butt than me?”

So what is this — legitimate worry of giving the wifey the wrong impression? or is he more worried about giving himself the wrong impression?

Dan Tracer

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