Cultural Canada – Canada’s Top 7 Museums for Travelers
While Canada’s new history and lack of recognized presence on the international art scene makes it difficult for the up and coming country to feature on such lists as TripAdvisor’s recent ‘Top 10 Art Museums’, Canada’s a great place for culture hounds looking for interesting, unique, and contemporarily relevant art and exhibits.
HIV Epidemic Among Gay Men in UK Continues
An estimated 6,840 new HIV diagnoses were reported in 2007 in the United Kingdom, according to latest figures from the Health Protection Agency (HPA) published this this week. The figures show that over the past 12 months there has been no evidence of a fall in the current high rate of HIV transmission among gay men within the UK.
Hollywood Celebrity Buzz: Priscilla Presley, Tyra Banks
For the past four years, I’ve stared at Priscilla Presley‘s face and wondered if she got into a fight with Jocelyn Wildenstein or just crashed a Weho pumping party. Turns out the latter is close to the truth and now the doc who pumped Presley’s face with Jiffy Lube is being deported. Plus, Tyra Banks says she wants to call it quits and Whitney smoking crack? Thanks a lot Perez.
D.C. Gay, Lesbian, Bi Students 10 Times More Likely to Have Used Meth
Gay, lesbian, and bisexual students in DC public schools are 10 times more likely to have tried crystal meth than their peers, according to a new fact sheet released by D.C. Public Schools. The D.C. fact sheet does not explain what accounts for the numerous health disparities including crystal meth use, but is likely in part related to a school climate that can be hostile and unsafe.
Reluctant gay rights hero seeks serenity abroad
Delwin Vriend looks out the window of his apartment in the heart of old Paris.
Across the street, a 17th-century mansion houses the Musee Picasso, the world’s largest collection of Pablo Picasso’s paintings. From there, it’s a short walk to historic Notre Dame cathedral.
In Europe’s most beautiful city, Vriend seeks an unobtrusive life, the daily commute on a crowded train to his computer job in the suburbs, home at night in time for vegan dinner with his partner and perhaps a walk through the neighbourhood shops.
t’s a long way, deliberately so, from Edmonton and King’s University College, the private Christian college that fired the chemistry instructor in 1991 for being gay.
After the heated seven-year battle that followed — it wasn’t until 1998 that the Supreme Court finally ruled that gays must be included in provincial human rights laws — Vriend moved away, seeking the balm of anonymity, first in San Francisco and later Paris.
In his first interview in recent years, Vriend now says he has a very different view of those tumultuous days.
“When I look back, it was one of the best things that happened to me, though it didn’t seem so at the time,” Vriend says on the phone from Paris.
Without the force of those historic events of the 1990s, he says, he might not have found a way out of the strict version of Christianity of his upbringing that condemned homosexuality as contrary to its religious doctrine.
Reluctant gay rights hero seeks serenity abroad
Edmonton Journal, Canada - also Bold ruling set the stage for a social revolution Edmonton Journal
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State College mayor holds commitment ceremony for 4 gay couples
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – Mayor Bill Welch presided over a commitment ceremony for four gay couples, even though the state does not legally recognize same-sex marriages or civil unions.
More than 500 people cheered after the ceremony, which looked very much like a wedding, at Penn State University’s Alumni Hall on Saturday. Two groups protested the event, which was organized by a group of Penn State graduate students to start the annual Pride Week for gay, bisexual and transgender students.
The couples , Frank Vasquez and Paul Datti, James Collins and Ryan Fitzpatrick, Kat Sinclair and Delia Guzman, and Amanda Applegate and Donna Coffman , exchanged vows and rings, and sealed their pledges with a kiss.
“We were really nervous, all of us, until we came out of Boucke (Building) and everyone cheered,” Guzman said. “From that point, it was like we were walking on air.”
Steve Glassman, the state Human Relations Commission chairman, contributed readings to the ceremony and called the day “historic.”
State College mayor holds commitment ceremony for 4 gay couples
Philadelphia Inquirer, PA –
Also:
· Pride takes on prejudice with same-sex ceremony Centre Daily Times
· 4 couples take vows, promptingprotest The Patriot-News – PennLive.com
· Events in State College to push legal status of gays into spotlight
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A Very Difffernt "Book of Revelation" on Film
The Book of Revelation (118 mins, 18) Directed by Ana Kokkinos; starring Tom Long, Greta Scacchi
Ana Kokkinos’s 1998 Head On was the depressing story of a gay Greek-Australian drug addict in Melbourne who refuses to study or get a job and devotes his life to random sex with strangers between hefty intakes of heroin, coke, hash and booze. Her next big film, The Book of Revelation, a rather more interesting work, is also set in Melbourne, but higher up the social scale. Its handsome hero, Daniel, a gifted dancer for a fashionable modern ballet company, goes out one afternoon to buy a packet of cigarettes for his girlfriend and comes back two weeks later, incapable of telling anyone what happened. It transpires that he was abducted by three beautiful masked women, who chained him up in a deserted warehouse, sexually humiliated him then dumped him on waste ground.
See The Book of Revelation
The Observer, UK
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A tragic love story transcendent beyond sexuality
MATT Zemeres lovingly calls his mum “one of those over-enthusiastic mothers”. She has flown down from her Brisbane home to see him five times in the play Holding the Man since its Sydney premiere in 2006. And she saw it four times in its recent Brisbane season.
“Each time she came she brought a stack of friends and family,” says Zemeres. “She drags her poor partner along too, Dennis. He’s this stereotypical Aussie male, a really straight-up-and-down bloke, but he loves the play, and cries in it. So I think that’s a good sign, when someone like Den can sit through the show nine times.”
First and foremost, Holding the Man is a love story. Playwright Tommy Murphy, who wrote the play from the book of the same name by Timothy Conigrave, calls it “one of our greatest love stories in literature, full stop”.
Holding the Man began as a memoir by the Melbourne-born Conigrave about falling in love as a teenager with Xavier College schoolmate — and captain of the school football team — John Caleo, and their subsequent 15-year relationship. The union ended tragically at the height of the AIDS epidemic, with both men succumbing to the disease. Caleo died first and Conigrave less than two years later in 1994, just months before Holding the Man was published.
A tragic love story transcendent beyond sexuality
The Age, Australia
Read the book upon which this play Is based see Holding the Man
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Sex and the New Zealanders
How dare a pompous pommy poofter visit our fair and perfect isles and publish a few criticisms of us and our way of life? The bloody nerve of the man! Didn’t he understand that the only acceptable answer from a visiting writer or celebrity or politician or sportsperson to the spoken or unspoken question “What do you think of New Zealand?” is: “Very nice.” Jay Bennie chats with Duncan Fallowell…
Duncan Fallowell managed to get through customs and immigration, settle into Devonport for a few weeks, and then tiki tour the country looking for a refreshed perspective on his life back in England, without learning the manners expected of any guest in our world class little country. Shame on him. A Sunday Star Times story, headlined Welcome to Hellhole and infused with outrage that Fallowell had found some of us less than attractive, caused a bit of a backlash. Maybe the devious sod had peppered his just-released book Going As Far As I Can with a few criticisms to provoke knee-jerk publicity from the easily outraged, but Fallowell puts the blame for the brief backlash on the media ‘beat up.’ See Sex and the New Zealanders
Gay NZ, New Zealand
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Gay marine opts for path ‘out’ – Jeff Key, now of Salt Lake City, stars in play recounting his decision to leave service
The salad hasn’t even arrived on our table, but already Jeff Key knows more about me than any of his fellow Marines were allowed to know about him.
“We’ve been talking for five minutes and I know that you’ve got a wife and a daughter,” Key says in a smooth Alabama drawl. “Those are just the kind of things that men talk about.”
Key’s observation belies a fundamental flaw with the military’s so-called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy for homosexual soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines. The men with whom he went to war were supposed to trust him with their lives – but he wasn’t supposed to trust them with his secret.
Key, an Iraq war veteran, anti-war activist and now-discharged Marine, tells his story in a one-man play, “The Eyes of Babylon,” which opens at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center, in his adopted town of Salt Lake City, on Thursday. A documentary based on the play, called “Semper Fi: One Marine’s Journey” will play at the Tower Theater on Monday.
It didn’t take long for the Marines who served with Key at Camp Pendleton, in southern California, to realize he was keeping something from them. “I certainly didn’t endeavor to come out to people,” Key says. “But, you know, I got pushed a lot. One guy was always asking me, ‘Why don’t you have a girlfriend?’ and ‘Why don’t you tell us what you’re doing this weekend?’” ee Gay marine opts for path ‘out’
Salt Lake Tribune
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