Gay incident reopens Salt Lake City’s Main Street plaza wounds
It’s the wound that won’t heal. The rift that won’t close. And earlier this month, two gay lovers’ purportedly innocuous late-night kiss — though LDS Church officials insist it was far more amorous than that — ripped it wide open. Utah’s simmering religious divide boiled over — once again — at the geographical and philosophical intersection of church and state: the Main Street Plaza in downtown Salt Lake City. “It is a scab that will continue to be peeled away — and may never heal,” says Dani Eyer, the former ACLU director who fought to preserve First Amendment rights on the plaza. Matt Aune and Derek Jones say they held hands, kissed and then squabbled with security guards on the LDS Church-owned square. Salt Lake City police issued a ticket for trespassing. In protest, supporters of the couple staged a “kiss-in” last Sunday outside the plaza and plan another such demonstration today. The LDS Church — a faith to which 60 percent of Utahns belong — defended its right to regulate “inappropriate behavior” on the plaza. “What we’re seeing now is a manifestation of what should have been obvious from the very beginning,” says former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson. “This block of Main Street never should have been conveyed to the LDS Church. It was a recipe for ongoing resentments between the LDS Church and those who are not members.” The church bought the strip of Main — from North Temple to South Temple — in 1999 after then-Mayor Deedee Corradini and the City Council, with the only two non-LDS members dissenting, signed off on the $8.1 million deal. But the controversy burned for five more years as federal courts were asked to settle the prickly issue of whether the church could govern expression on the plaza and whether the city could retain a public right of way (as outlined in the original deal). “It was meant to be for everybody,” Eyer says. “Where people come and go their constitutional rights go with them.” After a 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in 2002, First Amendment activities returned to the plaza. But demonstrations by anti-Mormon protesters — including cries of “whore” and “harlot” hurled at newlywed brides — “sustained divisions” that “reached to the point of hatred” between Mormons and non-Mormons, Anderson says. In the end, he agreed to trade the public easement for cash and LDS land to build a west-side community center.
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/gay-incident-…
Humpday Isn’t Really About Gay Sex
Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, a sexual sitcom, opens with a pair of breeders in bed. A youngish married couple, Ben (mumblecordeon Mark Duplass) and Anna (Alycia Delmore), confess they’re too tired to procreate that night and then confess their mutual relief. As if in response, the doorbell rings at 2 a.m. and Ben’s long-lost college buddy, Andrew (Blair Witch Project survivor Joshua Leonard), stumbles in from deepest Mexico. Anna, who has never had the pleasure, watches the unexpected bromantic action with grim incredulity. Aggressively loud, demonstrative, and hairy, Andrew is a credible representation of Ben’s id.
Reuniting an uptight married man with a footloose old pal, Shelton’s third feature offers a (much) more extreme version of Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, also a sort of buddy movie, also shot in the Pacific Northwest. In this case, the lost weekend is steeped in sexual anxiety. Friday night, Ben has to retrieve merry Andrew from a house called “Dionysus” — home to a bi cutie (the director herself) and an omnisexual assortment of roisterers. No orgies, but plenty of stoned dancing. Anna, who has prepared her signature pork chop dinner, sits home alone. She stews; Ben gets stewed. Prompted by news of an amateur porn festival — sponsored by a local alt-weekly — Ben finds himself proposing to costar with showoff Andrew in a mad art project, dude-on-dude action, totally straight, yet somewhere “beyond gay.” Maybe they’ll be famous. The only problem: Just who is going to bone whom?
Having thus invested its protagonists in a game of “chicken,” played to justify their respective life choices, Humpday delivers some excellent situation comedy. The scene where Andrew and Anna have a get-acquainted drink and Andrew inadvertently exposes Ben’s boastful lie that his wife has signed off on their “project” is pure Honeymooners. (Bang, zoom, straight to the moon!) Ben can’t tell Anna why he wants to have sex with Andrew, only that it’s very, very important to him. And, terrified that Ben might think he really did have a yen, Andrew can only sigh, “I wish I was more gay.” Of course. Just as Brüno is more of a comment on celebrity culture than the love (or hate) that dare not speak its name, Humpday is actually less a queer comedy than a satiric view of macho. Appreciative as Shelton may be of her dudes, she has another agenda. Each in his own way, the guys have been freaked by a manifestation of assertive female sexuality — although the term “pussy-whipped” is never used.
See Humpday Isn’t Really About Gay Sex
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/07/humpday-isnt-…
Iraqi gay men face ‘lives of hell’
Grainy footage taken on a mobile phone and widely distributed around Baghdad shows a terrified young Iraqi boy cowering and whimpering as men with a stick force him to strip, revealing women’s underwear beneath his dishdasha (Arab robe).
“Why are you dressed as a girl?” roars one of the men, brandishing his stick as the youth removes his brassiere.
The sobbing boy, who appears to be about 12, tries to explain that his family made him do it to earn money, as they have no other source of income.
The scene, apparently filmed in a police post, reinforced reports of a campaign against gay men in Iraq which activists say has claimed the lives of more than 60 since December.
In the latest manifestation of the campaign, posters have appeared on walls in the poor Shia suburb of Sadr City in eastern Baghdad, listing alleged homosexuals by name and threatening to kill them.
Those named have gone underground, while gay men throughout the city and in some other parts of the country also live in fear.
See Iraqi gay men face ‘lives of hell’
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Video: C-SPAN Vignette: US Army Patrol in Diyala Province, Iraq C-SPAN Video: C-SPAN Vignette: US Army Patrol in Diyala Province, Iraq C-SPAN
Fresh Anti-Gay Death Threats In Iraq On Top Magazine
Iraqi Gay Murders Surge; World Finally Takes Note Gay City News
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/04/iraqi-gay-men…
