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You are viewing the most recent 13 entries August 25th, 200806:18 pm: Don't help the AFA campaign against gay wedding cards
Hallmark has joined California and Massachusetts in recognising gay partnerships. The popular greeting card company has been rolling out same-sex wedding cards featuring two tuxedos, overlapping hearts or intertwined flowers, with best wishes inside. "Two hearts. One promise," one says. -Hallmark releases gay wedding cards Someone on my f-list asks (posting a link to the American Family Association's website): Why not use the provided space to send a supportive message to Hallmark for making same-sex greeting cards?Because the objective of the AFA is to crash Hallmark's e-mail system until Hallmark concedes and withdraws the gay wedding cards. That's what they did to get Heinz to withdraw the "gay kiss" ad, and it worked. If enough people use the form to send an e-mail, it will be irrelevant what the content of the e-mail is: no one at Hallmark will read it. They will simply count volume, and presume that every single person using the AFA form to send an e-mail is a vote for withdrawal of gay wedding cards. That's why not. If you want to support Hallmark, go buy a Hallmark card and a stamp and write a supportive message to: Donald J. Hall, Chairman, Hallmark Cards, 2501 McGee Trafficway, Kansas City, MO 64108, USA. I'll look up the UK address, too. (Update: Hallmark Cards PLC, Bingley Road, Heaton, Bradford, BD9 6SD) Update: If you want to send an e-mail, use the Hallmark contact form - Hallmark are apparently reading the mail from that and sorting good from bad. Current Mood:  annoyed August 10th, 200805:08 pm: Orson Scott Card: homophobic Humpty Dumpty
I spent eight hours or so yesterday (after a five-hour stint in the Forest, of which more later) writing a rebuttal to Orson Scott Card's latest piece of homophobic bigotry. Then I redrafted it and improved it over five hours today. Now it's up on the feministsf blog and I'm quite bloody pleased with it, though I think I've probably spent twice as long writing and researching my rebuttal than Card did on his original, and it's 3 times as long. And I still have to work on my Cagney and Lacey thing. Possibly, however, I should do something like go out for a walk... We had about two inches of torrential rain last night. Next weekend, my neighbour is planning a street party. I plan to make a cake, and hope it doesn't rain.... Current Mood: tired , orson scott card
July 2nd, 200805:49 pm: Bleeding gently, but there's cake
Period started this morning. I had run out of coffee. I downed two paracetamol and made myself kasha with garlic and chili for breakfast. (And before he left, Transamurai left me a piece of cake he'd bought to treat himself - fabulous gooey chocolately nut cake.) My new sinus medication is making me cough, I think - at least, I have a persistent cough that was awful just after I started taking it, and is better now, but still persisting. But I can breathe! And this is a plus, definitely. Breathing is good. I had a whole list of stuff to get done in June, and though I haven't totted it up (I should, yes) I got not a lot of it done, and I put that down to the depressing effects of Not Being Able To Breathe Proper. I am a bit ranty. This may be because I am also right now completely bloody (well, not completely, but you know what I mean: I am bloody and bloody-minded and bleeding ungently, do not cross me) but it's also that there is a whole stack of stuff to be ranty ABOUT, not least something I cannot write about properly till next week: the Home Secretary's completely split-personality attitude to hate crimes against LGBT people. It's bad that LGBT people in Britain should be intimidated and abused. But it's perfectly okay for LGBT people in countries like Iran and Syria and Jamaica to go in fear of their lives - they should just learn to "conduct themselves discreetly", you see. I have a friend coming up from York this weekend: she was going to arrive tomorrow night but fecal matter has hit fan and it won't be till Friday night. Reason for visiting: a friend (of hers, not mine) is getting married on Sunday, and she was invited to the wedding and figured she could cadge free accommodation with me. Which is lovely, because it will be great to see her again and have a chance to talk properly. The friend of a friend is marrying in the Hindu temple, the Mandir, which is about a mile and a half away - the other side of Leith Walk. I have blagged an invitation - well, permission, perhaps, since I gather the wedding service is open to all. (There's going to be a long reception/dinner afterwards, to which my friend is invited, and I'm to slope off sharpish.) I've never been to a service in a Hindu temple, and I am a complete religious tourist: I'm really looking forward to it. I note, though, that the Mandir's website mentions "actively discouraging discriminatory behaviour on the grounds of race, religion, colour, nationality, age, gender, marital status or disability". See what's missing? Yeah, so do I. Ah well. Current Mood: angry , eating some delicious food, just my life really, seeing friends
June 30th, 200812:56 pm: Heinz homo haters
With reference to the news of last week: total signatures on the reinstate Heinz Mayo ad is now 11595. "I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a tin of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. Now, now... Here's looking at you, kid." Heinz is one of those homespun blue-collar brands that is a staple of our national diet. Its ketchup has just been voted by consumers as the brand with the most "equity", for goodness sake, after scoring highest against measures such as familiarity and quality. So how did Heinz get it so wrong with this ad?
Having been bold enough (or naive enough ... you choose) to sign-off a script in which two men's lips meet, Heinz was careful to make the whole gay thing a "joke": it's not as though either of the men in the ad is obviously meant to be gay, they both look so straight you could draw a line with them.
But adland knows full well that any suggestion of homosexuality in ads will hit some pressure points (reason enough, you might think, to challenge prejudices). Controversy will have been fully anticipated, and this ad will have been thought through thoroughly before the play button was pushed.
Which makes it all the more astounding, and disappointing, that Heinz was so easily cowed when the inevitable complaints tumbled in. The company wasted no time in sheepishly withdrawing the commercial. Which naturally sparked another row, this time with gay groups: Stonewall and the radio station Gaydar called for a global boycott of Heinz brands in protest.
Really, Heinz couldn't have stirred up more controversy if they'd tried – and a few cynics out there think maybe they did try, that the whole gay saga that dominated marketing headlines last week was a massive PR stunt. If it was, it backfired big time.
What's certainly true is that Heinz has proved itself to be too easily swayed, spineless even. Of course, for all its careful and sensitive self-regulation, sometimes adland gets it wrong and misjudges the nation's mood; advertising that causes genuine and understandable offence should be swiftly withdrawn.
But really, Heinz had an opportunity here to take an enlightened position, to defend the inoffensiveness of a (pretty dispassionate) kiss between two men. If we believe that advertising not only reflects society and its culture but helps shape it, then there are times when advertisers have to take responsibility for the influence they wield.
Heinz may argue that in responding to the complaints and withdrawing the ad it is doing exactly that. But it doesn't seem to have thought carefully enough about the wider message its actions might have sent out: that tacit endorsement of a gay relationship is something to be embarrassed about, to regret. And that's a very dangerous position for one of the nation's favourite brands to find itself in. Claire Beale And: . A global brand introduced a new television commercial in which two men were seen (briefly) to kiss on screen, owing to the transformational power of mayonnaise. See, the Book of Revelation just isn't specific enough on the seven signs of the Apocalypse. If only the four horsemen weren't so easily confused with fictional characters in condiments commercials then we wouldn't be in this mess. As it is, the religious right and heathen left are locked in an utterly futile and bombastic ideological row involving countless online petitions about whether Armageddon is signified by the fact of the ad or the pulling of the ad. Which was not banned and neither will it be, if the regulator ever bothers even to look at it.
It turns out that many of the complaints were organised by religious groups in the US, where the ad has never been broadcast. Offence is now apparently a global currency and officially a unit of measurement. I blame the internet. Given that, the BBC board should be rereading the key end-of-the-world signs just to double-check that there's no paragraph suggesting that if a head of marketing shall replace a longstanding head of radio, the bells shall ring and man shall be wiped out. Janine Gibson I know, I know; it was just an ad. An ad which American news stories have mentioned "it wasn't to be broadcast to children" without specifying that this was because Heinz Mayo contains way too much fat and sugar, not because two men kissed. But there was something about the way Heinz pulled it so fast, so apologetically, as if they should have realised that showing two men kiss is offensive to right-minded people. Tell Heinz. Pass it on.Current Mood: annoyed , angry queer, food politics, i watch tv, writing complaining letters
June 25th, 200804:10 pm: Heinz means bigot
Nigel Dickie: "Heinz is a global company and we respect all universal rights. The advertisement was intended to be humorous, not designed to cause offence to anyone. Clearly it failed in its intent to amuse and that is why we took the decision to withdraw it." You know what "respect all universal rights" means? It means not sexual orientation and not gender identity. Those aren't "universal" rights. Last Monday, Heinz started running a new advertising campaign for Heinz Mayo. (A fat-filled, sugary product that it would take an ad this cute and funny to sell, truly.) The ad was supposed to run for five weeks. The ad opens with a stereotype-family - a boy and a girl going to school, a father going to the office. The young boy and girl go to the kitchen to get their sandwiches, which are being prepared by a man with a New York accent, dressed in a deli serving outfit, who they refer to as "mum". When their father goes to get his sandwich he says to the man in the kitchen: "See you tonight love." However, the man barks back "Hey, ain't you forgetting something?", at which point the two men share a kiss. The man then sends the father off with the words: "Love you. Straight home from work, sweet cheeks." It isn't exactly a gay ad: it isn't exactly a straight ad. This isn't a same-sex couple bringing up kids together: it's a half-uneasy joke, "the concept behind the campaign is that the product tastes so good, 'It's as if you have your own New York deli man in your kitchen'." But on Friday, Heinz pulled the ad. Apparently the advertising watchdog got over 200 "complaints" that the ad was offensive and that two men kissing were "inappropriate". (Bill O'Reilly apparently said on air on Friday "So why are they doing that? Why -- it was. It was obviously a gay thing. Now I don't know what the message is, other than gay people like mayonnaise. ... I'm confused. This whole gender blending thing. It's confusing to me. ... I just want mayonnaise. I don't want guys kissing.") Nigel Dickie, Director of Corporate Affairs for Heinz UK, said the reason for pulling it was: “It is our policy to listen to consumers. We recognize that some consumers raised concerns over the content of the ad and this prompted our decision to withdraw it. The advertisement, part of a short-run campaign, was intended to be humorous and we apologize to anyone who felt offended.” Heinz.com1. Sign the Re-instate the Heinz Deli Mayo TV ad. 2. Contact Nigel Dickie: 020 8848 2726, Nigel.Dickie@uk.hjheinz.com (from their press release) Tell Dickie you weren't offended. (You can view it here or here.) 3. Contact Heinz direct: www.heinz.com, click on the Contact Us link. Tell them you won't buy a Heinz product until the ad's being broadcast again. 4. If you normally buy Heinz, don't. 5. Pass it on! I know, I know: it's just a TV ad. And however cute the ad, it's an appalling product. But Heinz's instant capitulation to homophobic bigots was so naked. Dress it up with a squirt of organic tomato ketchup and make your own baked beans. Current Mood: annoyed , angry queer, food politics, i watch tv, writing complaining letters
January 28th, 200808:33 pm: Oh no. I refuse to believe it. The universe is not so badly designed.
Orson Scott Card was given the Margaret A. Edwards Award for his "outstanding lifetime contribution to writing for teens". The two books named are Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, the novel and the paraquel about the infant Hitler who committed genocide of an entire species and then fled with his sister through thousands of years to a Brazil-type planet where he redeemed himself. (See: Heterosexism all right for teens! on feministsf blog and Farah at The Inter-Galactic Playground.) Orson Scott Card is a bigot. He doesn't like Muslims. He doesn't like "homosexuals". He supports Romney for President, and Romney's connections to terror camps for teenagers are strong and direct. ( Read about the lawsuit. Seriously: Orson Scott Card wants the next President to be a man whose two main fundraisers both made their millions running prison camps to which parents could send their adolescents who were being too gay or too uppity or too independent, to have them broken so they'd know not to be like that any more.) But most of all... Orson Scott Card is a bigot. His bigotry isn't something away in the past, something he said or did when he was a teenager or a very young nan: he's written bigoted columns about LGBT people (and about Muslims, now) in the past twenty years. The Margaret A. Edwards Award is sponsored by School Library Journal and administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), a division of the ALA. Card will be honored at the YALSA Edwards Awards Luncheon and presented with a citation and cash prize of $2,000 during the 2008 ALA Annual Conference to be held in Anaheim, California, June 26-July 2. Believe me, if I could get there, I'd be picketing. If you can get there, picket for me. Giving Orson Scott Card a "lifetime achievement award" says something. It says that the people who decided he should get the award either did not know he is a homophobic bigot - which says they haven't informed themselves of much about him - or knew and didn't consider it important. Nor did they consider it important that he doesn't like Muslims. Members of the 2008 Edwards Committee are: Committee Chair Brenna Shanks, King County Library System, 960 Newport Way NW, Issaquah, WA 98027, USA; Patty J. Campbell, Horn Book Magazine, 56 Roland Street, Suite 200, Boston MA 02129, USA (pcampbell@hbook.com); Ruth Ellen Cox Clark, AA Library Education Tech & Distance Instructor, Joyner Library 1806, East Carolina University, East Fifth St, Greenville, NC 27858-4353, US (clarkr@ecu.edu); Erin Downey Howerton, Johnson County Library, 9875 West 87th Street, Overland Park, Kansas, KS 66212, US; Kimberly L. Paone, Elizabeth Public Library, 11 South Broad Street, Elizabeth, New Jersey, NJ 07202, USA. (Where there are links, they go to "contact us" comment pages.) Also, the American Library Association, 50 E. Huron Street, Chicago, IL 60611. YALSA's e-mail address is yalsa@ala.org. What I have in mind to do is send them all copies of Dissecting Orson Scott Card. I'll format it all into one document and PDF it: if you'd like a copy too, comment here. If you don't feel someone who's written that "The argument by the hypocrites of homosexuality that homosexual tendencies are genetically ingrained in some individuals is almost laughably irrelevant. We are all genetically predisposed toward some sin or another; we are all expected to control those genetic predispositions when it is possible" is someone who should be given a lifetime achievement award for writing for teenagers, write to them, too. ---Update: ( The response I attempted to post at the Library Journal website )---Second update ( I wondered what inspired that rotten screed on gay marriage )---Third update ( YALSA responds )Current Mood: angry , dissecting orson scott card
November 12th, 200703:12 pm: Straight people are just so much more interesting than you, Mark
Gay playwright announces he's going straight.Seriously. Mark Ravenhill, a boring man with a lot to be boring about, has announced that as writing about LGBT people makes him yawn, from now on all his characters are going to be 100% heterosexual. This will be welcomed by critics who have been compelled to sit through his plays about gay characters, such as Mother Clap's Molly House. The Mother Clap Trap by Rictor Norton in Gay Times, September, 2001, issue 276, pages 33-34. "Frankly, I am glad that no permission was sought or granted, so that I am free to dissociate myself publicly from Ravenhill's play. It is dominated by themes of perversion, abnormality, unnaturalness, shame and self-hatred, all of which are absent from the real world of 18th-century gay men, or 'mollies' . Ravenhill has systematically distorted gay history."
"Good gay history is so rare, it is a great shame that once positive images have been unearthed, they should be deformed by homophobic stereotypes. The press release proclaims Ravenhill's play to be 'a fascinating insight into a hidden chapter of London's history'. On the contrary, it is a gross misrepresentation of gay history." It's a sin by Mark Simpson in The Independent on Sunday: Etc, 26th. August, 2001, page 7. "If Mother Clap's Molly House succeeds in showing the shockingly pleasurable side of buggery at the National Theatre perhaps it might prove as much a cultural watershed as The Romans in Britain. Since it was staged in 1980, using anal sex as a metaphor for imperialism, sodomy between men has been completely colonised by violent cliché - and not only in the theatre, but in films and even TV soaps."
"What's truly scandalous, however, is not just how often this meta-anal cliché has been deployed on stage and screen, or even the way that the audience just lies there and takes it, but the way in which every playwright/scriptwriter lazily reaching for it seems to think that they are being original, so fearless, so visceral." (from The Knitting Circle) Current Mood: bitchy October 21st, 200709:24 am: Actually, I’m kind of annoyed.
For two reasons: One, saying Dumbledore was gay after Book 7 was published and there aren’t going to be any more is kind of a cop-out. Would have taken a lot more guts (and been a lot more interesting) if she’d spelled it out in Book 7, rather than leaving it subtextual and admitting it only after Potterdammerung is well over. The other: Lupin was gay. Tonks was a dyke. They got married off to each other as soon as possible after some fans pointed out to Rowling that Lupin “read” as gay, and they were both killed off - in fact, Tonks was never seen alive again after she married Lupin. Outing Lupin and Tonks would have been something I’d have welcomed, no matter when it happened. And finally, though I admit this beyond what you can expect of any writer: Harry Potter is probably one of the most widely-read children’s books in the world, and certainly the most widely-read children’s book in recent publishing history. It would have been a fantastic thing to do for LGBT children at school if Neville (or any of the kids - but I had hopes for Neville) had turned out to be gay, living with (in a civil partnership with!) another man. But no. He gets married off heterosexually like the rest of the kids, and the only gay man Rowling will admit to in the Potterverse is Dumbledore, and she won’t admit that he ever had a relationship with anyone except unrequited love for an evil wizard. (Oh yeah, this is the Dumbledore was gay revelation from J. K. Rowling. If you hadn't already heard.) (This is based on a comment I made on feministsf - the blog!.) --- Update: The best kind of fannish commentary: makes you weep and go squee at the same time. Gay-Albus Motivational Posters. Current Mood: annoyed , angry queer, books are what i read
February 2nd, 200601:19 pm: How I fixed Brokeback Mountain
Over coffee with Ajay the other night, she said she was looking for fanfic that would fix Brokeback Mountain for her. I told her if she got a livejournal (which she's resisted so far) she could join communities for fanfic about Brokeback Mountain, and she looked tempted, but said no, she was looking for fanfic that would fix it, not for fanfic about it. So I told her my mental fix-it: ( spoilers, kind of )Tags: angry queer, brokeback mountain, fannishness
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