Bruno: Satire, Humor and Stereotypes
See Bruno: Satire, Humor and Stereotypes
Huffington Post -
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/06/bruno-satire-…
MoxieQ Launches First Mobile “Gay Sensibility” Destination for Consumers Who Want the Gay POV
MoxieQ, the first mobile-centric gay entertainment publisher, today announced its official launch as a mobile and online entertainment destination with a gay sensibility. MoxieQ was founded by two pioneers in the mobile advertising industry — Heidi Lehmann, co-founder of Third Screen Media (which was acquired by AOL in May 2007) and Kim Olson, a founding member of the Sprint Mobile Media Network. The service appeals to the more than 16 million, $712 billion-spending members of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) community as well as other consumers who want the gay perspective.
The Premier Gay Mobile Entertainment Destination
The publisher debuted its editorial talents at the GLAAD Media Awards in New York, March 28th and in LA, April 18th, where MoxieQ media personalities Ryan and Caroline, formerly of Clear Channel’s Pride Radio, conducted red carpet interviews with celebrities including Suze Orman, Tyra Banks, Judith Light, Kathy Griffin and Wilson Cruz. The GLAAD awards recognize accurate and fair LGBT portrayals and news content in the media.
“We are proud to share our TV ‘Gayed’ weekly guide to what’s LGBT on TV and outstanding LGBT-inclusive commercials from GLAAD’s online ad library with MoxieQ as they bring important and entertaining content to our community on the go,” said Neil Giuliano, President of GLAAD.
Leading Brand and Celebrity Partners
MoxieQ partners include a number of leading LGBT celebrities and brands: BRAVO’s “The Fashion Show” personality and underwear designer Andrew Christian, DishMiss, Gay Cities, GLAAD, LOTL, Ryan and Caroline, Under the Pink Carpet and Witeck Combs Communications.
“I am excited to have my products featured in the ‘Daily Briefs’ section of MoxieQ,” said Andrew Christian. “My viewers and customers are young, hip, and on the move which means the mobile channel is a primary way for them to discover new products. MoxieQ is a perfect match for us to expose our latest designs directly to our target consumer.”
For Advertisers Targeting the LGBT Community
MoxieQ exclusives deliver sassy, short-form content such as Test your Gay IQ, Psychic Snacs (“gay” horoscopes), Ask Mr. Moxie, “Bite, Sip and Buy” recommendations for gay and green businesses, and up-to-the-minute Gay Weather.
“The LGBT and LGBT-friendly demographics are a perfect fit for both mobile and advertising, with an audience that is increasingly looked to by the mainstream consumer as trendsetters with tremendous influence and insight into what is hot and cutting-edge,” said MoxieQ founder and CEO Heidi Lehmann. “MoxieQ is designed to provide both a primary source of entertaining content and interactivity with a gay twist and an extremely targeted environment for brands who want to reach this valuable community.”
MoxieQ is designed to appeal to the gay community and people who want access to fun and irreverent gay themed content, games, and “in the know” advice and insights. The destination is ad-supported with future revenue models to include premium, syndicated and online content. MoxieQ Media is available now on the mobile phone at: http://m.moxieq.com or on the web at www.moxieq.com.
About MoxieQ Media, Inc.
Based in New York City, MoxieQ is an entertainment and advocacy site with a gay sensibility. It features original, syndicated, and user generated content, formatted for mobile phones and the PC. MoxieQ’s unique mix of information, games, recommendations, audio, video and interactivity, captures the irreverence and trendsetting perspective of this hip and influential demographic. Through MoxieQ, Fortune 500 brands will be able to reach the LGBT market directly. For more information, visit us at http://m.moxieq.com or www.moxieq.com.
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/06/moxieq-launch…
Global video mashup for International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia 2009 hits the Internet
359 people from 48 countries take part in massive global web video project to mark the IDAHO 2009
A global project to create a public awareness video for the International Day Against Homophobia & Transphobia (IDAHO) on May 17 has attracted the participation of 359 people from 48 countries across six continents around the world. The groundbreaking project is a joint undertaking of the Paris-based IDAHO Committee and the social network Gays.com, attracting 50,000 people to its website within a month.
Said Louis-Georges Tin, founder of the IDAHO committee, “We are overwhelmed and, at the same time, humbled by this torrent of enthusiastic support that has poured in from all four corners of the world since we kickstarted the video project in April. People have made the effort to go to such places as the Statue of Liberty, the Great Wall of China, the Sydney Opera House, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Merlion, the Petronas Twin Towers and the Eiffel Tower to shoot their video, contributing to the spectacular visual feast you see in the mashup.”
In April, members of the global LGBT community were invited to step out in front of the camera and in their own language introduce themselves, state where they are from and how proud they are to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. The result is a video that sends the powerful message that LGBT individuals are present in every country, every society and every corner of the world. Participants submitted videos in all of the world’s key languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Cantonese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Tamil and even American Sign Language.
In addition to the groundswell of support from local communities from around the globe, renowned celebrities, activists, politicians and web personalities have also participated in the project. These include (in alphabetical order):
Ali Hili: Gay Iraqi activist now living in exile in London and founder of the Iraqi-LGBT group
ANT: Host of VH1 reality series Celebrity Fit Club and U.S. of ANT on MTV’s LOGO channel
Lizzy the Lezzy: Animated lesbian standup comedy character with a cult following on Youtube
Michael Buckley: Celebrity host of the entertainment show What the Buck, the 5th most subscribed comedy channel of all time on Youtube
Michael Kauch: German member of parliament and coordinator of the gay and lesbian policy for the Free Democratic Party
Stephen Williams: British Liberal Democrat member of parliament for Bristol West
Said Kenneth Tan, spokesperson for Gays.com, “Much has been said about Stonewall 2.0 and netroots activism since the Proposition 8 vote against gay marriage in California. This project was made possible only by the Internet, and we believe there are a limitless number of opportunities for the LGBT community to harness the power of the Internet to educate, raise awareness, promote equality, and to debunk myths. We have been honoured to partner with the IDAHO Committee in the execution of such an amazing project.”
Prior to the launch of the video, Gays.com announced that it experienced a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack which began at approximately 3.50am Hong Kong time on May 15, 2009, causing the entire website to be inaccessible.
A distributed denial of service attack occurs when a multitude of systems attempt to flood the bandwidth or resources of a targeted system with illegitimate website requests. The flood of traffic by these requests cause the Internet bandwidth of the attacked site to be consumed to such an extent that the website is inaccessible to other legitimate users.
Said Kenneth Tan, Gays.com spokesperson, “The timing of this DDoS attack on Gays.com is by no means a coincidence. We have been working for weeks on this high profile video campaign together with the Committee for the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia. The final product of this campaign, a public awareness video, was going to be launched on the campaign site at http://gays.com/idaho on Sunday. This is a well-timed, well-orchestrated assault by a large botnet with tens of thousands of PCs sending requests to our site. Engineers with our Internet Service Provider remarked they have never seen an attack of this intensity before. We deplore these unscrupulous actions by an organised group to harrass, intimidate and silence us for what we are doing.”
Added Tan, “Our technical staff are now working round the clock to restore services to legitimate users. In the meanwhile, we are going through our access logs, gathering information through various mechanisms and connecting the dots to identify the origin of the attacks. We will be working with law enforcement officials to bring the cyberterrorists to justice.”
The video “IDAHO 2009: One Voice, One Message, Heard Around the World” is now accessible at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2Rp8ep_ezE
The Committee for the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO) is a network of activists, present in over 50 countries, who seek to promote the idea of an international day against homophobia and transphobia. This day has been recognized officially by a number of governments around the world and provides an opportunity for the LGBT movement across the world to unite in a powerful demonstration of collective visibility.
Gays.com was designed for members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community as the world’s first LGBT social networking website that designed for real people with real names an real world connections. The site aims to build an authentic social environment that helps people maintain their relationships with people they actually know. Launched in May 2008, Gays.com is headquartered in Hong Kong with a development team spread between Shanghai, China and Bielefeld, Germany.
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/05/global-video-…
Gay rights in Japan blurred on TV
When Sean Penn won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of slain San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk two weeks ago, he used his acceptance speech to rail against supporters of California’s Proposition 8, which last November repealed a State Supreme Court ruling extending marriage rights to same-sex couples.
Penn’s confrontational tone was in keeping with his prickly public persona, but it was also in line with his character’s real-life activism. Milk was one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States, and the fact that he was openly gay defined his policies and goals.
“Milk,” the movie for which Penn won the Oscar, works better as political history than it does as biography. Harvey Milk’s long-term goal was to help build a society in which homosexuals participated fully without having to hide or deny their sexual preferences. But because he understood that many people abhorred those sexual preferences, he knew such a society could not be built on persuasion. He would have to force the issue through political action, just as the civil-rights movement won equality for blacks.
There was one stark difference, however. Black people couldn’t hide their blackness, while gays could hide their homosexuality. The only way Milk could accomplish his long-term goal was to urge his fellow homosexuals to come out and acknowledge their same-sex preferences to their families, friends and communities. He did this by presenting himself, often humorously, as a militant sodomite (“My fellow degenerates!”); in other words, someone who was going to live his life as he pleased.
The fact that Proposition 8 passed 30 years after Milk’s assassination means that his goal has not been accomplished, but his confrontational methodology has become the standard for gay activism. In the process, gays have become culturally, if not necessarily socially, mainstreamed in the U.S. In movie terms, that development is proved not so much by the Oscars for “Milk,” but rather by the box office success of the crude adolescent comedy “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry,” in which gay stereotypes and jokes are thrown back at antigay attitudes. “This is America,” says the main character, played by Adam Sandler. “You should have the right to put anything you want up your ass.” It’s something Harvey Milk could have said, and probably did.
It will be interesting to see the reaction to “Milk” when it opens here in April. There have been a few gay office- holders at the local level in Japan, but political action for homosexual interests is virtually nonexistent, mainly because there are no laws that explicitly proscribe homoerotic activity or deny rights to individuals who are openly gay. On the other hand, social pressure against coming out remains strong.
The media reinforces this situation by boosting TV personalities who trade in gay stereotypes without ever actually mentioning gay sexuality. It’s the whole point of the popular Nihon TV variety show “Oneemans,” where homosexuality really is the love that dare not speak its name. Last fall, NHK presented a two-part discussion about LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) on “Heart Talk,” a show that addresses social issues from a perspective of sensitivity. Though the program drew the derision of Shincho magazine, which wondered if LGBT was really a proper topic for a public broadcaster, it received a positive reaction from many viewers, and NHK aired a followup last month. Most of the discussion was about the difficulty of coming out to friends and family, and how important it was for LGBT people to receive support from parents. There was a profile of a Sapporo support group for parents of LGBT, one of whom appeared in the studio with his mother.
The show was basically an appeal for understanding, filled with testimonials from LGBT people about their loneliness and inability to function normally in a society that won’t acknowledge their situation. It was a passive appeal. The LGBT people who spoke out are waiting for society to change. One participant said LGBT should come out only when they were in a positive frame of mind, since doing so out of anger or frustration might create negative feelings. The advice was mostly about being respectful of other people’s — i.e., straight people’s — feelings. Even the example of the lesbian couple who made a point of not hiding their relationship from the neighbors was presented cautiously. The two women would walk through the streets hand-in-hand greeting everyone they met, and after a year or so people accepted them. However, on TV their faces were blurred out, as were many of the other LGBT participants’. They were not scared for themselves; they just didn’t want to take the chance of making friends and family uncomfortable.
The LGBT participants who did not opt for masking had more than a personal stake in the matter: former Osaka prefectural assemblyperson Kanako Otsuji, Setagaya Ward assemblyperson Aya Kamikawa, psychologist Toshiaki Hirata and some LGBT organization representatives. Hirata explained that the government’s new antisuicide measures do not take into consideration LGBT-related suicides, but that was as far as the discussion went into public policy. It was not the purpose of the program.
The purpose was to show how LGBT people feel, and it seemed clear that the main obstacles they need to overcome in order to live their lives freely are society’s fundamental ignorance and their own fears. In that regard, the program’s blurred-out faces and polite deference to straight sensibilities can only be considered counterproductive.
See Gay rights in Japan blurred on TV
The Japan Times
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/03/gay-rights-in…
‘Milk’ shows high stakes of gay rights movement
Democracy at the street level makes for great theater. Shipyard workers in Gdansk, the newly enfranchised in Selma or the newly liberated in Baghdad – “people power” is electrifying to behold.
“Milk,” the long, long-awaited bio-film of gay politician and “community organizer” Harvey Milk, is filled with such political thrills. It’s about a man who pioneered the cause, was elected to office as an openly gay man and who was martyred, just as he always predicted.
This history, brought vividly to life by filmmaker Gus Van Sant and a great cast headed by Sean Penn, debuts as a “community organizer” has won the presidency and the country wrestles again with gay rights.
“Milk” doesn’t waste a moment in telling Harvey’s story. From the opening credits, a montage of vintage TV and newsreel footage of police raids on gay bars in the ’60s, it gives us context, personalities, the stakes in the struggle and one who saw the big picture. See ‘Milk’ shows high stakes of gay rights movement
The Southern, IL
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/01/milk-shows-hi…
Chris Bryant Reminds Us Why We Don’t Have a Gay Sex Site Account
Everybody, repeat after me: “There is no such thing as privacy on the Internet.” Want to keep something a secret or don’t want your Mom finding out about it? Here’s a hint: Do not put it on the Internet. Do not put it under a fake screename, do not try to disguise it and think you’ll cleverly avoid identification. Take it from someone who spends his days become an instant expert on personalities, subjects and issues– you can do wonders with a well-placed Google search. I know, you’re smarter than everyone else, nobody cares about you and you’re discreet, but I guarantee, someone will find you. See Chris Bryant Reminds Us Why We Don’t Have a Gay Sex Site Account
Queerty, NY
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Original source : http://gay_blog.blogspot.com/2009/01/chris-bryant-…
