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Belfast Serves Pride to Northern Ireland
Thousands of participants and supporters took part in the 25th annual Belfast Pride parade in Northern Ireland.
Thousands of participants and supporters took part in the 25th annual Belfast Pride parade in Northern Ireland.
Michael Luong
www.advocate.com/pride/2015/08/06/photos-belfast-serves-pride-northern-ireland
VIDEO: GOP Presidential Candidates in Their Own Words on LGBT Issues
While none of the major presidential candidates have yet said where they stand on the RNC’s anti-LGBT resolution, the Human Rights Campaign has assembled video of a number of candidates discussing LGBT issues in their own words.
HRC.org
Gay Staten Island Man Physically, Verbally Attacked By NYPD Files $25 Million Lawsuit
A gay Staten Island man who claims he was beaten, threatened and endured gay slurs from four New York Police Department officers during a noise complaint call is planning to launch a whopping $25 million dollar lawsuit against the NYPD and the four officers reports The Huffington Post.
Falcone’s lawyer Eric Subin obtained footage of the disturbing assault and shared it with reporters; Falcone found himself disturbed after watching the video, turning away from the television screen:
“I’m disturbed. I’m disturbed as a person, as a gay man, as a human being — just to see this happen to somebody, even if it wasn’t me. It’s just crazy how these cops act. I can’t go to work. I can’t stand for long periods of time. I can’t sleep.”
NYPD officials maintain Falcone was punched in the face by his brother, who was drunk at the time, during their initial conflict who later fled the scene, and that Falcone “was acting irrational and spit in a PO’s face while he was being taken into custody.” Falcone and Subin deny the NYPD’s allegations and that Falcone was compliant with officers until he was forcibly removed from his mother’s home. Falcone’s lawyer stated that the lawsuit filed on Tuesday names the NYPD, the four officers and the city of New York as defendants and seeks $25 million in restitution for violations of Falcone’s civil rights, excessive force and police brutality.
A MoveOn.org petition claims the four police officers are still on active duty with no evidence of disciplinary action from the NYPD regarding the incident.
The post Gay Staten Island Man Physically, Verbally Attacked By NYPD Files $25 Million Lawsuit appeared first on Towleroad.
Anthony Costello
Gay Staten Island Man Physically, Verbally Attacked By NYPD Files $25 Million Lawsuit
WATCH: Jim Obergefell Challenges Republican Candidates on Marriage Equality
Ahead of tonight’s debate, the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court marriage equality case notes the lack of support in the GOP presidential field.
Trudy Ring
Through Your Lens: 10 Rainbows From Around The World To Bring A Smile To Your Week
The WorldPost’s “Through Your Lens” series brings you mesmerizing photos taken by social media users in different countries around the world every week.
Rainbows have long evoked a sense of mystery and wonder in popular culture. An Irish legend holds that the rainbow’s end is where leprechauns hide their pot of gold. In Armenian mythology, it is considered the belt of the god Tir. The rainbow has also been the symbol of hope and social change — both the LGBT movement and post-apartheid democratic South Africa use rainbow flags.
And, after seeing these gorgeous photos, we can see why. From Switzerland to Myanmar to Costa Rica, anyone and everyone can enjoy nature’s gift of color, no matter what climate or hemisphere they may be in.
Nafplio, Greece
Maligne Lake, Jasper, Alberta, Canada
Mittelberg, Austria
Mansfield, Victoria, Australia
St. Moritz, Switzerland
Yangon, Myanmar
Moteverde, Costa Rica
Njivice, Montenegro
Russia
Belfast, Ireland
Check out the WorldPost on Instagram for more vibrant photography and tag your Twitter and Instagram photos with #WorldPostGram so we can feature them in our next post.
Related on HuffPost:
— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
Transparent star Jeffrey Tambor meets Caitlyn Jenner and finds her ‘amazing and gorgeous’
Jeffrey Tambor’s on-screen alter ego on TV’s Transparent has much in common with Caitlyn Jenner.
Both transitioned from male to female late in life and both are the father of several adult children which makes for a lot of drama.
Tambor says he recently met Jenner when the former Olympian had dinner with some cast members from the show.
‘I’m a cisgender male and I’ve been honored with playing this role so I’m humbled when I meet Caitlyn and talk with her – she was fabulous and she is really, really well-versed, and she’s committed,’ Tambor said during at appearance on The Late Late Show With James Corden on Wednesday (5 August).
He also described Jenner as ‘amazing, and gorgeous and very dedicated.’
Tambor is up for a best actor Emmy next month for his performance as Maura Pfefferman and has spoken out on transgender issues since taking on the role.
‘The bottom line about all of this is this is serious business – it’s about safety and lives are at stake,’ he said.
The post Transparent star Jeffrey Tambor meets Caitlyn Jenner and finds her ‘amazing and gorgeous’ appeared first on Gay Star News.
Greg Hernandez
GOP Candidates on Marriage Equality
www.hrc.org/blog/entry/gop-candidates-on-marriage-equality?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss-feed
“Bro-Jobs” Author Talks Straight Man-On-Man Sex And “Repressed Homosexual Desire”
“Sometimes straight men touch each other’s dicks or touch each other’s anuses,” Jane Ward (pictured) tells Queerty in an exclusive interview, “and they do it for a number of reasons that they don’t perceive as sexual.”
The provocative Ward is an associate professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California Riverside, where she teaches courses in feminist, queer, and heterosexuality studies.
She is also the author of the best-selling Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men, which is currently lighting up the blogosphere.
In an exclusive interview, Ward spoke to Queerty about the reasons so many straight-identifying men hookup with each other and the mysterious origins of the word “bro-job.”
Queerty: First, I believe a congratulations is in order. You’re book is currently #1 on Amazon’s Gay & Lesbian Nonfiction list.
Jane Ward: I have to say I’m delighted, but I’m also surprised. I was not expecting so many people to be interested. I think it’s triggering for a lot of people. Gay men have an investment in it. I’ve also gotten a lot of feedback from bi-identified people. And of all these people — I’d say, 95 percent — have not actually read the book yet, so that’s interesting. And then this word “bro-job” got thrown into the mix which, interestingly, I don’t even use in the book. But now that’s sort of taken on a life of it’s own.
Did you coin the term “bro-job” or did it emerge from comment boards on the internet?
I wish I had coined that term, but I did not. I do describe in the book what could arguably be called “bro-jobs,” but I never once use that word. So later, it’s sort of like a game of telephone, four blogs down the line I’m reading stuff that says “Jane Ward has written an entire book about ‘bro-jobs’.” I just had to laugh. But also I worried for the gay men who would be like “Oh, of course I’m going to buy that!” and think it’s going to be something more pornographic than it is. So hopefully they won’t be disappointed. There are some hot photos in the book, for sure!
OK, so if it’s not “an entire book about ‘bro-jobs’,” what is it about?
Well, there’s been a lot of interest in the past 10 or 15 years in the broader culture on the subject of sexual fluidity, but the attention has focused almost exclusively on women. You know, girls who hookup or make out with girls at parties or at the club or whatever for the attention of straight male onlookers. Or it has focused on mostly Black but also Latino men on the down-low. And so the book emerged, in part, out of the question: Who’s left out of this conversation about sexual fluidity? Well, it’s straight white men. But do they not also have a more complex sexuality than we have imagined, and, if they do, then why are we not talking about it? This book is about shining the spotlight on what straight white men are up to with one another.
So what are they up to with one another?
A lot! When writing the book, I did not do any interviews with straight-identified men themselves. I looked at historical documents, military documents, a lot of photographic evidence, news reports, and personal ads placed by people claiming to be straight-identified men. I looked at the Hells Angels biker gang. I looked at research on the history of straight-identified men having sex with men in public bathrooms. I looked at examples in popular culture.
A lot of people have conducted research on sex between straight-identified men, but often they are looking at one particular context. Like prisons, for instance. Often what those researchers conclude is: These are straight-identified men who are engaging in temporary homosexual sex acts under very unique circumstances. In prison, no women are sexually available and so straight men are doing this out of deprivation.
What I argue in the book is that straight men actually manufacture opportunities to have sexual contact with one another all the time in pretty much any environment, whether it’s constrained or not, whether women are available or not.
What makes a straight-identifying man who has sex with men different from a bisexual man?
In the book, I ask the question: Might it be productive to allow people to choose their own sexual orientation? To let them pick the label?
When straight-identified people engage in homosexual sex and they have no interest whatsoever in bi identification or gay identification, they want nothing to do with queer subculture, they’re deeply invested in heteronormativity, they feel very comfortable with straightness, they want to be understood as straight, then it’s actually most useful to say these people are straight.
If we’re thinking of bisexuality or homosexuality as purely technical descriptions of sex acts and not sexuality identities, then yes, whenever somebody is engaged in homosexual sex we could say that it’s homosexual. But that doesn’t tell us anything about the identity of the person involved or the cultural context in which that sex is occurring.
Homosexual sex and desire is basically part of the human condition. It’s what all humans do. The difference among us is how we understand those sex practices, and straight people understand what they’re doing very differently than bi or gay people.
How exactly do they understand it?
Often the people I write about in the book don’t think what they’re doing is sexual at all. I mean, if you’re a gay man and you put your finger in another man’s anus, there’s a really good chance you think that’s a sexual act. But the straight men I write about who engage in the exact same act don’t think so. They call it a joke, they call it hazing, they call it humiliation, they say “I was drunk,” and it flies under the radar of sexuality because the person engaged in it truly doesn’t have any meaningful attachment to that sex act.
A lot of people would probably argue, “No, that’s not true. They are gay. They’re just expressing repressed homosexual desires.”
I would say this kind of contact between straight people is so common that if the way that we’re going to make sense of it is to say they’re just closeted and repressed and gay then everyone is closeted and repressed and gay, and that does not seem very useful. The vast majority of those people are going to have hetero weddings and they’re going to have kids and they’re going to live out their straight lives and they’re never going to look back on that time they put their finger in another dude’s butt while they were in a fraternity and be like, “I was secretly gay.” That’s not what’s going on here. What’s going on here is that sometimes straight men touch each other’s dicks or touch each other’s anuses and they do it for a number of reasons that they don’t perceive as sexual.
So what are some of the reasons?
One of the primary reasons they do it, ironically, is as a way of strengthening their heterosexuality and expressing their homophobia. It’s like, “If I can stick my finger in another dude’s butt and I can make a big show of how gross I think it is, and when I’m done I can stand up, still a straight dude, totally unbroken, not a fag, then I’m all the more heterosexual.”
That makes sense when it comes to hazing or drunken debauchery, but what about the guys you mentioned who are placing personal ads looking for other straight men to hookup with? How is that strengthening their heterosexuality?
You have to look at the function of the sex act. Obviously, one function is to get off. But sex acts also have a lot of cultural meaning. When we have sex it helps to build our identity or reinforce something about our identity. When you’re straight and you’re having homosexual sex, you set that sex up in a way that it reinforces your heterosexuality.
If you look at the casual encounters ads on Craigslist, for instance, a lot of the men say they want to watch straight porn together. They want to talk about women and women’s bodies. Some of them want to talk about gang rape of women. Some of them want to talk about sexual conquests in college. There’s a lot of homophobia in the ads with people saying “I don’t want to do any fag shit,” “This is just going to be a hand job,” or whatever.
But those are just anonymous personal ads posted on Craigslist. Anyone could be writing them.
Of course, this is the internet. I did not interview these men. It could be anyone writing these ads. We don’t really know. But certainly what we do know from these ads is that they’re crafted in a way that’s expressing a desire for a kind of sex that would happen between straight men, that would be totally heteroerotic, not homoerotic. They want to drink beer, watch sports, watch straight porn, talk about pussy.
I could be wrong, but I’m queer and I’ve been friends with gay men for 20 years, and this kind of fantasy of talking about vaginas while giving each other hand jobs is not something I’ve seen in gay subculture. Have you?
I can’t say that I have. I also can’t say that I’ve ever met a gay man who has expressed the need to fool around with a woman to affirm or reaffirm his homosexuality.
We live in a heteronormative culture. Straight men, especially in junior high and high school, but even later on, live constantly under threat of someone thinking they might be a fag. So they’re kind of obsessed with constantly performing their heterosexuality.
One way they manage that is by being homophobic, by constantly talking about how other men are fags, because if you can make other men fags, then you’re not a fag. Another way is through these sort of chicken acts of playacting at being gay.
The story is different for gay men. Most people, in the process of coming out, go through the process of dis-identifying with straightness or heterosexual culture. After that, once one is marked as queer, there’s far less work that needs to be done to sustain their queer identity.
OK. Sort of like how once you’ve been made an outcast, you live and think like an outcast.
Right. Because once you’re in that category then the expectations are far lower. Thank god. You’re liberated.
Why do you think gay men are so fascinated by the subject of straight-identifying men having sex with other men?
Well, anecdotally, I think many gay men find it really hot! And I think many gay men have had sex with straight-identified men or are familiar with this dynamic.
From an academic perspective, I think there are a few important reasons. One is that the boundary between straight and gay, or straight and bi, is such a significant part of our daily existence and our claims to nondiscrimination. One of the most expedient gay political arguments is that we are all “born this way” — with the idea being that straight people must accept us if we have no other choice than to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual. But this argument leaves very little room for sexual fluidity. It also raises confusion for people about how someone who appears to have been “born straight,” let’s say, could engage in homosexual sex.
I think another reason gay men are so interested in this topic is that many straight men can be such homophobic assholes, that there’s some pleasure in knowing that even straight dudes engage in some of the very same behaviors that they shame gay men for participating in. And I think a lot queer people — not just gay men — have an impulse, for better or for worse, to want to swell our ranks, to feel like our tribe is growing, and so we walk around like little gay detectors looking for other people we can claim as one of us.
Related: Five Reasons Every Straight Man Should Go Gay At Least Once Or Five Times
Graham Gremore
Watch This Model Try on 100 Years of Men’s Swimwear in 3 Minutes: VIDEO
From the same team that recapped 100 years of men’s fashion in 3 minutes comes this mesmerizing video showcasing the evolution in men’s swimwear over the past century.
From striped one-piece suits to board shorts, men have been stripping down and showing off their beach bodies in a variety of ways over the years.
Dive into the video below and let us know what your favorite era was in the comments section.
The post Watch This Model Try on 100 Years of Men’s Swimwear in 3 Minutes: VIDEO appeared first on Towleroad.
Kyler Geoffroy
Watch This Model Try on 100 Years of Men’s Swimwear in 3 Minutes: VIDEO
Catholic Boy Scout Troop Rejects Gay Leader
Greg Bourke’s ‘heart is broken’ after learning he would not be allowed to rejoin the Kentucky troop.
Daniel Reynolds
www.advocate.com/boy-scouts-america/2015/08/06/catholic-boy-scout-troop-rejects-gay-leader
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