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24 Aug 2010

Let us prey

Toronto is not known for the kind of extreme Christian shenanigans that other parts of North America are known for, so when a group from an Evangelical church took to praying the gay away outside the house of a local gay couple, other residents of the street confronted them and shooed them away. Reportedly the group had already succeeded in driving a lesbian couple from the area. At one point one of the Evangelicals says, "We've been doing this seven years", to which one of the residents replies, "And we've hated it the whole time!".

(Link: Torontoist / Via: Towleroad)

religion poisons everything | world | gays | sex
Comments 1

24 Aug 2010

This makes it official: Houston South Quarter is now the gayest area of Dublin

Because I happen to know that that's where this was filmed. Don't ask me how I know these things, I just do. It's a trannie gift. Opus Gei & The Glorious Mysteries rehearsing in the dying light of the day for their clearly very gay performance at the Electric Picnic in "the gay tent".

Note to Opus Gei & The Glorious Mysteries if you're reading this: who's the cutie in the black & white horizontal stripes that looks over his shoulder at 1:02 and why hasn't he flirted with me before? Why?!

electric picnic | gays | performance
Comments 7

13 Aug 2010

Novellist Colm Tóibín on homosexuality, the Church, and the Pope's own sexuality

Colm Tóibín writes an in-depth piece in the London Review of Books on homosexuality and the church. It's worth taking the time to read it in full.

Here's part:

There are very good reasons why homosexuals have been traditionally attracted to the priesthood. I know these reasons because I, as someone ‘confused about my sexuality', had to confront and entertain the idea that I should join the priesthood. In 1971, aged 16, I gave up my Easter break so I could attend a workshop for boys who believed they had a vocation.

Some of the reasons why gay men became priests are obvious and simple; others are not. Becoming a priest, first of all, seemed to solve the problem of not wanting others to know that you were queer. As a priest, you could be celibate, or unmarried, and everyone would understand the reasons. It was because you had a vocation; you had been called by God, had been specially chosen by him. For other boys, the idea of never having sex with a woman was something they could not even entertain. For you, such sex was problematic; thus you had no blueprint for an easy future. The prospect, on the other hand, of making a vow in holiness never to have sex with a woman offered you relief. The idea that you might want to have sex with men, that you might be ‘that way inclined', as they used to say, was not even mentioned, not once, during that workshop in which everything under the sun was discussed.

That you were gay was something you managed to know about yourself and not know at the same time. I am almost certain, for example, that when I was warned by a priest at school that a boy who had parted his hair in the middle had by this act given a sign that he was homosexual (the only time the term was mentioned in those years), the priest himself had no clear and open idea that he himself liked teenage boys. (He would spend time in jail more than 20 years later for abusing teenage boys.) He would have had a way, learned for good reasons in adolescence, of keeping some of his actions and desires secret from himself. His sense of power and entitlement would also have meant that such crimes as he committed would most likely not see the light of day. The priesthood had, as far as he was concerned, solved his problems for him.

This is almost an aspect of the Catholic religion itself, this business of knowing and not knowing something all at the same time, keeping an illusion separate from the truth. We knew that the bread and wine, for example, were literally and actually changed into the body and blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ by the priest at Mass, and, at the same time, we must have known that this was not the case, that, really, they remained just bread and wine.

The shame an adolescent felt about being gay in those years should not be underestimated; the feeling that you were less than worthy, that if people found out the truth about you they would despise you, went deep into your soul. This was another reason to become a priest. You could change your own powerlessness into power. As a priest, you would be admired and looked up to, you would spend your life - as so many Catholic priests have indeed spent their lives - doing good and being good. And being seen to be good, being needed by the sick and the dying, being wanted to officiate at weddings and baptisms and funerals, saying the sacred words which would mean so much to the congregation, all this would offer you a fulfilled and fulfilling life. Becoming a priest solved not only the outward problem of forbidden and unmentionable sexual urges, but, perhaps more important, offered a solution to the problem of having a shameful identity that lurked in the deepest recesses of the self.

This idea of knowing two things at the same time has been essential to gay people in other ways. Gay people have known that our sexuality was actually, despite what we read or were told, quite normal, quite natural; it was only the world that thought otherwise. While the world's view often ate into the self, there was another part of the self which remained intact, confident, sure. Introspection, the study of the self, for gay people became necessary, fruitful. The struggle between our knowledge and their prejudice often meant that a spiritual element in our being - something private, wounded, solitary and self-aware - had reason to come to the fore and seek nourishment in a close relationship to God. This is another reason so many gay men have become priests.

Gay liberation made its way, strangely, into the seminaries. I have a letter from a friend, an Irish writer, sent in response to a piece I wrote for this paper about the Ferns Report, describing his visit to an Irish seminary in the 1980s.[*] Since the Church was liberalising at that time, it would not have been unusual for writers to be invited to seminaries to speak. My friend had no intention of being shocking, or amusing. He spoke about literature, choosing the dullest subject for the seminarians. What he noticed among them, however, was anything but dull; and it surprised him greatly. He saw an immense amount of male fluttering; he listened as young candidates for the priesthood, boys from rural Ireland, attempted Wildean witticisms; he noticed them wearing specially tailored soutanes, moving around each other, excitedly, like a flock of girls. Here it was, and he was not the only one to witness it: ‘the takeover of the seminaries by homosexuals'.

But this was merely what it looked like. What such a seminary would have looked like a generation or two earlier, or indeed a century or two earlier, was as much an illusion as what my friend witnessed. Before the creation of a post-Stonewall gay identity and the presence of gay role models on television and in the movies, most gay men worked out a strategy, in early adolescence, to do a perfect, lifelong imitation of a straight man, to move around in that gruff, rangy way straight men had invented for themselves. For many homosexuals, the stereotype of the mincing, high-pitched queen was the most frightening idea that ever walked towards them. They hated it and feared it and worked out ways not to look like that themselves, or to be invisible when they did so.

religion poisons everything | people | literature | gays
Comments 15

09 Aug 2010

Stephen Fry: In praise of Louis Spence

The always interesting Stephen Fry has a blog post on a number of subjects but I reproduce here the part where he writes about Pineapple Dance Studio's Louis Spence because he is so right. It concerns a Pink List of the top 100 most influential gays that appeared in the Independent On Sunday last weekend, where Stephen was given the #3 spot, but Louis was included in a "rogues gallery" at the bottom of the list. 

The Pink List

Also while I was away, The Independent on Sunday published their "Pink List". Many tweeted to congratulate me on "achieving" No. 3 spot in this top 100 of British gay ... er ... icons... apparently. Well, far be it from me to be ungrateful. I'm sure it's always nice to be mentioned admiringly, just as it is always dispiriting to be mentioned slightingly. All of you reading this (or those of you that aren't bots or visitors from other worlds) are human and will understand why a part of me was tickled to be included. I am sorry to say that I did not read the full list. First equal ("above" me) and pushing me into third place were rugby player Gareth Thomas and Mary "Queen of Shops" Portas which seemed splendid and fitting. Otherwise my eye flicked down to take in friends and others. I gave the whole production little time. My eye never reached the end of the article where resided a "Rogues Gallery". It had to be pointed out to me by a friend, a dear friend and a brilliant man, Kim Harris (my first proper grown-up lover from student days as it happens) that there was something horrid lurking in the article's basement. I have been trying to persuade Kim for ages to write a blog, for he puts things so well, far better than I do, as you will agree when you have read this extract from a letter he wrote just a few days ago and which I reproduce with his permission.

Very nice to see you ranking high on The Independent's Pink List. Quite right too. They made one vast and vastly suggestive mistake, though. They instituted a Rogues Gallery and frogmarched Louie Spence into it. Do you know who I mean? He's a big old lisping, nelly screamer at Pineapple Dance Studios (Sky something) whom Joe Sixpack has clasped to his bosom because he's sweet and funny and fabulous. Brightens the day, cheers the hour. There's another reason the public loves him, but we'll get to that in a mo.

The compilers of the List, however, hate him because - well, can't you guess? What's the least imaginative, least penetrating thing you could possibly say about an unreconstructed flamer? That's right - he "perpetuates the stereotype." Christ on a marmalade cross but that pisses me right off.

Occupying the top spot was the rugby player, Gareth Thomas, who came out (finally) last year. Well done for that, boyo, I suppose. Can't have been easy. It usually isn't for most people, even on the Liberal Riviera where we're all supposed to be basking today.

Now, you can see where I'm going with this, can't you? Gareth is a "real man". He was married to a real woman. Louie is not and was not. If only we could all disport ourselves like Gareth the straights won't hate us whereas if we all carry on like Louie....ach, how quickly these cowardly, self-oppressed, social-climbing McCarthyites forget where they come from. If I remember rightly, the whole Gay Lib thing wasn't engineered by "real" men at all. It wasn't sponsored by marines or scaffolders or rugby players. It was ignited by...ah, yes: drag queens.

So, instead of getting a hate on at poor Louie, instead of frantically trying to patrol their butch and instead of gussying up their drool for Gareth into blather about bravery, these creeps should remember the Rainbow. They should remember Diversity. They should remember Tolerance. They should remember that in evincing a distaste for effeminacy they're simply making an exhibition of their own misogyny. And they should remember that (and here's that other reason the public likes him) Louie isn't trying to pass. There's nothing a straight boy hates more than an obvious fag trying to hide it.

I know lists like these are mere churnalism but they're telling nonetheless.

Thank you, Kim. Thank you for pointing that out and thank you for putting it so very, very well.

Here is that "Rogues Gallery" paragraph on Louie Spence, by the way:

Louie Spence

Choreographer and TV star

Had this been a list for the greatest reinforcers of gay stereotypes, the star of Sky 1's car-crash reality show Pineapple Dance Studios would obviously mince it. Alas, as it stands, we can't help but hear the clock ticking on those 15 minutes of his.

The IoS has its get-out clause prepared, of course... "And the aim [of the Pink List] ? To entertain and celebrate, infuriate and amuse. Above all, to kick-start a debate around the breakfast and lunch-table. Please let us know what you think at the bottom of the page." But I'm sorry, that is simply not good enough. I say nothing of the sickening and now standard "oh please leave a comment, please, please, please - our advertisers would love it if you all starting flaming and trolling and filling our pages for us. Pleeeeaaase."

Among the panelists choosing this list was Ben Summerskill, Chief Executive of Stonewall: Stonewall, that same excellent institution that named itself after the bar in Greenwich Village where the drag-queens Kim mentions locked themselves in, fought back against police violence, intimidation and victimisation and kick-started Gay Liberation. I like Ben and admire what he and Stonewall do, but surely they must see how right Kim is? By singling out Louie Spence for lofty disapproval, by sneering at his "mincing" they are turning their back on, dissociating themselves from, insulting and demeaning a fine man and whole way of being. An authentic, strong, charming and loveable person, every bit as "courageous" as the others on the list, certainly more courageous than me, Louie deserves respect and support, not insult and derision. Do they want people like him not to count, do they see him as being guilty of a choice in his manner and his demeanour, just as homophobes everywhere accuse all gay people of choosing their sexuality and preferences? How dare they of all people dismiss a gay man in a few contemptuous, bigoted phrases because he doesn't fit the "type" that they think a gay man should exemplify? This isn't about pussy-footing, or political correctness or humourless righteousness and I wouldn't bring it into this blog if it didn't make me so damned angry. I do not know Louie Spence, by the way, have never had the pleasure of meeting him. Dance is not my life and our world outlooks and interests are, I dare say, widely divergent, but that does not mean I cannot respect and admire him.

The IoS panel who chose to scorn Louie owe him an apology, and they owe an apology to all like him. There was a time when polari and Julian and Sandy and limp-wristed mincing and winking innuendo were all that came between a certain kind of gay man and his pride, his self-respect and his ability to hold his head high in a hostile world. Read Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant or watch John Hurt's glorious portrayal. It is not the only way for a gay man to be, no one is saying it should be, but it is a wholly proper and acceptable manner (not to mention an often loveable and witty one) and to see it traduced with superiority by the very people who should be supporting and endorsing it sickens me. I have stood up and spoken for Stonewall and its campaigns to stop playground bullying and taunting: it is of course the effeminate and overtly camp boys (or butch girls) at school who first come in for that sort of attention, the kind of attention that alcohol and a gang mentality can turn all too readily into gay-bashing and severe violence. Is it now official Stonewall policy that only "straight-acting" gays are acceptable, that today's Quentin Crisps and Kenneth Williams's can count themselves as outcast from "the community"? Bah. They should read a bit of Judith Butler and think a bit harder about gender and identity.

I give up my No 3 position in the Pink List and award it to Louie Spence.

UPDATE NEWS FLASH

It is axiomatic that panels and judges of prizes or compilers of lists always sit in conditions of utmost secrecy, but I have had private word of an element of the deliberations that tells me that maybe the deliberators weren't to blame, but some Sindie journalist who took it upon him or her self to write the Rogues Gallery section without the deliberators' knowledge or consent. Well, if I have done Ben Summerskill and Clare Balding and the others who helped put the list together a disservice, I am really sorry. I hope it at least teaches them never, ever to trust a newspaper, especially - and this may surprise some - one like the Independent. Good old-fashioned red tops, vulgar, brash and blaring as they may seem, are usually more honourable and straightforward in their dealings than those with pretensions to be "newspapers of record"... Oh dear now I've gone and made myself a whole new parcel of enemies. Heigh ho.

S xxx

people | gays
Comments 3

08 Aug 2010

Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly Fond of Each Other

(thanks Patrick)

music | gays
Comments 0

08 Aug 2010

Der Gay Games

The Irish Times has a report from the Gay Games, currently taking place in Cologne. 

(thanks Eoghan)

gays | sport
Comments 1

31 Jul 2010

The Gay Games

The Gay Games kicks off in Cologne today, and Irish Shamrocks FC, one of Dublin's two gay soccer teams, are sporting a (rather large!) Pantibar logo on their shirts as they compete in the soccer. Good luck to them, and indeed the rest of Team Ireland. You can follow the progress of the Irish competitors HERE.

sport | gays | pantibar
Comments 0

31 Jul 2010

Blast from our gay past

Historian of all things gay and Irish Tonie Walsh sent me this:

Recently clearing out old stuff, I came across an interview I did with De Janet, a Belgian gay mag, that included photos from the condom picket I organised at the Vatican embassy during Pride week 1987. The picket (of five) was held, you'll recall, in the context of Rome resolutely denying condom use even as AIDS lay waste to our beloveds.
I've a delicious memory of giving out red stripe rubbers to over-eager, hormonal secondary students on the Navan Road, conscious that the very exchange was illegal!

And check out the Cardinal Ratzinger poster! Way ahead of the curve was the impossibly fresh-faced Tonie.

history | gays
Comments 1

31 Jul 2010

Joe McElderry (the kid who won the X Factor) comes out

Which will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who watched even a minute of that show. Still, it is a sign of how much things have changed that a young teen-popster can come out at the beginning of his career. Though whether he actually has a career ahead of him is still to be seen. Though he'll definitely be playing a gay bar near you in 5, 4, 3, 2...

Apparently he's done interviews with number of papers which will be out over the weekend.

Here's The Mirror's story.

And here's little Joe's statement to his fans.

gays | people
Comments 7

29 Jul 2010

If you're Catholic, here's another fella to make you real proud

This is 83 year old Chilean Cardinal Jorge Medina Estévez, who thinks being gay is "is a defect, as if one lacked an eye, a hand, a foot", and having gay sex is "immoral". But not to worry, "like alcoholics" you can overcome this tendency by "discipline, education, or reeducation." And just for good measure, if you're a gay Catholic and want to become a priest (obviously, none of you dirty women!) well, don't, because "ordination to the diaconate and the priesthood of homosexual men or men with homosexual tendencies is absolutely inadvisable and imprudent and, from the pastoral point of view, very risky. A homosexual person, or one with a homosexual tendency is not, therefore, fit to receive the sacrament of Holy Orders."

Catholic Culture has the report.

I really have difficulty understanding how there are any gay Catholics left. They hate you! They don't want you! You are an unwelcome member of a club the despises your very being. Have you considered Anglicanism? Or Shamanism? Or Dolly Parton?

religion poisons everything | world | gays | sex
Comments 6