yonmei

10:17 am: Why are people so cynical? Well...
mercurychaos asked this in context of the passing into law of the Matthew Shepard Memorial Act (yes, I know that's not it's real name) and I responded:

The thing is (from my own experience as an LGBT activist and lesbian) the two big steps in any movement towards equality are equal access to marriage (or even separate-and-almost-equal, blast it, but civil partnership is so damn close it was blissful even when it missed) and equal right to serve in the military.

And I say this as a militant pacifist.

Because both are public statements of equality made by the national (or in US, the federal) government. Protection against discrimination and harassment at work and in access to services, etc, that's useful but it's at least partially dependent on the person being discriminated against having the mojo to react, to say no, this is illegal, you're not getting away with this. But the freedom to marry (or at least get civil-unioned if it's recognised by the government as if it were marriage) and the freedom to serve openly in the military - those two are pro-active door-opening statements made by the government both to queers and to straights, to closet-cases and to bigots.

And I don't believe it's at all coincidental that those are the two steps which Obama is absolutely declining to do anything about but talk. Okay, talk is good, it means it's still on the agenda and he hasn't entirely forgotten that once upon a time he made a committment to LGBT equality and civil rights.

But Obama made the same committment to the Constitution with regard to warrantless wiretapping - and broke it: he made the same committment to international human rights with regard to torturing prisoners and locking them up in extra-judicial prison camps - and broke it: and he never once made a committment to seeing the criminals responsible for torture, extra-judicial imprisonment, and aggressive war investigated or tried, which is just as well because he's done nothing else with regard to that but focus on the cover-up to ensure they can never be prosecuted, since he took office. "Better than Bush" is not a particularly high bar to get over, and Obama clears it with ease, but there's no denying he's a conservative with a track record of broken committments on civil and human rights issues that I actually consider more important than his failure to follow through on his campaign promises about marriage and the military.

Significant though those are. Obama's been a disappointment - hugely better than Bush, but so much less than he could be. I don't have a problem with people continuing to hold him to a significantly higher standard than he's managed to reach.



Tags: angry queer, evil american politics, religious politics

10:09 pm: I stopped reading Savage Love because of the racism, but...
I used to find Dan Savage fairly entertaining. And probably still would, when he's got his dander up and is spilling vitrolic abuse all over straight men with massive cases of entitlement.

Then after Prop 8 passed in California he joined the whiter-than-white brigade of gay people blaming "African-Americans" for the success of Prop 8, and I drifted away because who needs the aggro?

Echidne of the Snakes, I think, linked me to a post he made yesterday - not a Savage Love column, which I haven't read in months, but one of his blog posts. Title, "Gay People Can Quote The Bible Too".

The pic is of (a man, I think) someone holding a white placard, on which is the text

"A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed" (Deuteronomy 22:13-21) cite

It's hard to number how many ways that sign fails.

(My favourite example of Mosaic law to quote back at people who tell me that being gay is a sin because "it says so in the Bible!" is the part about not eating bacon and not eating "milk and meat". Eating at McDonalds is an abomination - it says so in the Bible, what with all the cheeseburgers and bacon - and yet how often do you see conservative Christians standing around outside a McDonalds waving placards and demanding that the law act to stop people from going to hell by eating there?)

Also, it appears that not content with campaigning to deny healthcare to people with no money and/or expensive things gone wrong with them, right-wing Christians in the US now propose a sustained attack on healthcare clinics for women - from Wednesday 23rd September to 1st November, a campaign called "40 Days For Life", the plan is to try and organise mobs of anti-choice activists to visit 122 clinics across the US and harass the staff and the patients. All this only a few months after an anti-choice activist murdered Doctor George Tiller:

Anti-choicers harassed his patients, day in and day out. They bombed his clinic. They shot him once before. They filed lawsuit after lawsuit and even convinced local prosecutors to launch criminal investigations and trials (none were successful). They published his home address and the full names of his family members on their websites. They posted information about anyone who did business with him, from where he got his coffee to where he did his dry cleaning.

They had him and his staff wearing bullet-proof vests to work every day. Tiller drove an armoured car and protected his home with a state-of-the-art security system. And, to better enable stalking and harassment, they posted his daily comings and goings – including the fact that he attended services every Sunday at Reformation Lutheran Church, the place where he was ultimately shot and killed. cite

Since 1977, pro-lifers have murdered 10 people - mostly doctors - have attempted to murder at least 17 more; there have been at least 383 death threats, 153 incidents of assault or battery, three kidnappings, 654 anthrax letters (none of which actually contained anthrax - yet), 41 clinic bombings, 175 arson attacks... latest figures. This represents only the crimes reported to the police that were identified as pro-lifer anti-clinic violence.

Against this announcement of an organised terrorist campaign, there seems to be... a Facebook group.

But Dan Savage likes him a placard about killing women for not being virgins. Well, let me remember not to go to his site for any reason any more...



Tags: angry queer, bible, evil american politics, food politics, religious politics

09:14 pm: Saturday: party / Sunday: tiredness
I don't remember being this tired after the party last year, but then the party last year didn't happen while I was still a little jetlagged.

The icing on the cake turned out a tad disastrous (though the other women at the party, with their own experience of baking errors, were extremely supportive of the cake itself turning out all right). So there will be no photos of cake. Also, there are large quantities of leftovers. (Though most of my sesame scones got eaten.)

But I spent long stretches of time standing around in the street (we need more folding chairs) talking with my neighbours and drinking wine and eating delicious food that my neighbours had prepared, and it was good. We agreed we should do it next year, though I think it would help to set a date four or five months in advance: say February for July.

I made the mistake of tracking down John C. Wright's infamous post on "homosex" (apparently Hal Duncan's first open letter shamed him into deleting it, but it's still available on Google-cache and has been echoed in a few places) and, even though I knew it was going to be an ugly rant, I was really stunned at how hateful he was. And inspired, apparently, by the mere thought that a TV channel might actively seek to do more TV programmes in which people are not depicted as uniformly heterosexual.

There are three other related posts on Duncan's blog: Stoicism, Sophistry and Sodomy, On Sophistry and Subjectivity, and A Story From Sodom. All very worth reading.

(Update: also, Kip Manley's John C. Wright is recoiling in craven fear and trembling, and I don’t feel so good myself is another good one.)



Tags: angry queer, howls of rage

06:05 pm: Is that you, Doctor Barry?
Two or three weeks ago, someone contacted me to ask if I could recommend any LGBT historical novels set in Scotland/around Scots. So I pointed him at Iona McGregor's Death Wore a Diadem, and a novel that (I conscientiously admitted) I hadn't read, but looked interesting: James Miranda Barry, by Patricia Duncker, about the famous Doctor Barry who may have been the first woman to qualify as a doctor at a British medical school: we don't know. Neither do we know if she was a lesbian, or he was a trans man, or even if ke was intersexed.

James Barry seems to have come into existence in 1809: that was the year the student James Barry matriculated at Edinburgh University as a "literary and medical student". Barry qualified as an M.D. in 1812, nine years before Elizabeth Blackwell was born, fifty-three years before Elizabeth Garrett Anderson had her name entered on the medical register as qualified to practice medicine in Great Britain, and it was fifty-seven years later that Sophia Jex-Blake finally persuaded Edinburgh University to let her register as a medical student.

Barry then went to London and qualified as a surgeon, evidently with a view to an army career, receiving a commission in 1813. In 1817, Barry became the army Medical Inspector for Cape Town in South Africa, until 1828, during which time the surgeon performed one of the first known successful Caesarean sections: the baby and the mother both survived. After Cape Town, Doctor Barry's career included the West Indies - where John and Doctor Barry met - and Corfu, the Crimea, and Canada. (History of Medicine article - VERY BIG PDF)

Who was John? Described as a "black manservant", John is the only human life companion Barry had. (The film Heaven and Earth, apparently planned for this year, is set in Cape Town in 1825 and invents a heterosexual relationship for Doctor Barry with an English milord, the governor of the colony: Barry is blurbed as "the first woman doctor, who had to masquerade as a man".)

Though known in the army as a "ladies' man", who fought several duels, it's not known - and if we could call James Barry back from the grave to ask and get an answer, I doubt if we'd be any better informed - how we may identify this person in modern categories. James Barry was probably born Margaret Ann Bulkley - a letter from young James Barry to the family solicitor exists, with "Miss Bulkey" written on the reverse of the paper by the solicitor - and Margaret Ann Bulkey probably was allowed by her guardian to dress as a boy in order to take a medical degree - but when and why did Margaret Ann Bulkey decide that James Barry was how she would live and die?

Lesbian? Trans man? Should we even impose these ideas on a person who lived and died before the modern concepts of heterosexuality/homosexuality and transgender were thought of? How would James Barry have identified, if asked - aside from as "Doctor James Barry"? (Well, technically: Doctor Barry died just as these concepts were being thought of.)

Doctor Barry died in London, in 1865, after a successful military and medical career: was buried in Kensal Green with full rank: and then the woman who laid out the body after Barry's death revealed that the corpse had not been a man. (I find from wikipedia that the British Army, with its usual strong feelings about freedom of information, promptly sealed all records for 100 years - normally only practiced with matters affecting the personal embarrassments of the Royal Family or the safety of the realm. Oddly and interestingly, the first historian to look at the sealed records in the 1950s was a woman, Isobel Rae.) There was no autopsy, but apparently the layer-out claimed not only was the body of a woman, there were stretch marks indicating pregnancy.

Doctor Barry was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery: John went home to Jamaica, and no one ever seems to have asked him what he knew. I don't even know if anyone knows or would be able to find a family name for John. Four years later, Sophia Jex-Blake entered Edinburgh University's medical school, under no disguise.

Anyway. And the reason why all this is on my mind: I got a copy of James Miranda Barry in the mail this morning, because the person who'd asked for advice had evidently looked it up on abebooks, found two copies (mine cost a £1) and got one for me, too.




PS: Top Hot Butches

Tags: angry queer, books are what i read, gender, sometimes i love my job

09:36 pm: Power corrupts.
Barack Obama, 11th February 2004:

Today, I am a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Unlike any of my opponents, I have a legislative track record. No one has to guess about what I will do in Washington. My record makes it very clear. I will be an unapologetic voice for civil rights in the U.S. Senate.

For the record, I opposed DOMA [ the Defense of Marriage Act ] in 1996. It should be repealed and I will vote for its repeal on the Senate floor. I will also oppose any proposal to amend the U.S. Constitution to ban gays and lesbians from marrying. This is an effort to demonize people for political advantage, and should be resisted ... .

When Members of Congress passed DOMA, they were not interested in strengthening family values or protecting civil liberties. They were only interested in perpetuating division and affirming a wedge issue. ...

Political Radar, August 2007:

"He supports the complete repeal of D.O.M.A. which is the same position he has held since early 2004," Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt told ABC News.

Glenn Greenwald, 6th November 2008:

"Barack Obama has, on numerous occasions, emphatically expressed his support for repealing DOMA. When he ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, he wrote a letter to Chicago's Windy City Times, calling DOMA "abhorrent" and its repeal "essential," and vowing: "I opposed DOMA in 1996. It should be repealed and I will vote for its repeal on the Senate floor." But he went on to cite what he called the "the realities of modern politics" in order to proclaim (accurately) that DOMA's repeal at that time -- 2004 -- was "unlikely with Mr. Bush in the White House and Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress." After Tuesday, that excuse is no longer availing."

Barack Obama's Justice Department, 11th May 2009:

The constitutional propriety of Congress's decision to decline to extend federal benefits immediately to newly recognized types of marriages is bolstered by Congress's articulated interest in preserving the scarce resources of both the federal and State governments. DOMA ensures that evolving understandings of the institution of marriage at the State level do not place greater financial and administrative obligations on federal and state benefits programs. Preserving scarce government resources — and deciding to extend benefits incrementally — are well-recognized legitimate interests under rational-basis review. See Butler, 144 F.3d at 625 ("There is nothing irrational about Congress's stated goal of conserving social security resources, and Congress can incrementally pursue that goal."); Hassan v. Wright, 45 F.3d 1063, 1069 (7th Cir. 1995) ("[P]rotecting the fisc provides a rational basis for Congress' line drawing in this instance."). Congress expressly relied on these interests in enacting DOMA: Government currently provides an array of material and other benefits to married couples in an effort to promote, protect, and prefer the institution of marriage. . . . If [a State] were to permit homosexuals to marry, these marital benefits would, absent some legislative response, presumably have to be made available to homosexual couples and surviving spouses of homosexual marriages on the same terms as they are now available to opposite-sex married couples and spouses. To deny federal recognition to same-sex marriages will thus preserve scarce government resources, surely a legitimate government purpose.

Update:

The brief was written by a Bush administration appointee, W. Scott Simpson, honoured in 2005 by Alberto Gonzales for his work defending the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act against multiple constitutional challenges.

darkrose, on whose journal I first read the quote from the brief, has written a letter to the President.





Tags: angry queer, evil american politics

11:08 am: #Stonewall: 40 Years Since
At 1 in the morning, 28th June, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Bar in New York.

This was standard: they'd line up the customers and let the nice clean-cut straight-acting white gays and lesbians go, and arrest the rest. Racially targeted arrests: and also - an overlapping target - the drag queens, the transvestites, the butch dykes, the transsexuals, the bulldykes - the ones who couldn't pass.

Only this time, the queers fought back. For days. New York City brought in riot police, and still they fought.

There was a gay equality movement before Stonewall - but Stonewall remains, even for those of us in other countries, an iconic moment. We celebrate Pride because of Stonewall: the festival of summer, the rainbow party where, for a day, for a few hours, we can be in a world where we don't have to be afraid.

At 1 in the morning, 28th June, 2009, we should all get together in a public space and celebrate 40 years since Stonewall.

Let us do it. Let us announce it. Twitter it. Facebook it. Journal it. Round the world, 1 in the morning, 28th June, let's.



#Stonewall

Tags: angry queer

08:36 pm: Jeanette Winterson has no sales rank on Amazon
Amazon.com (I don't know how far Amazon.co.uk is taking part in this) have stripped all "lesbian novels" or "gay novels", of their sales rank.

Because, you see, such novels - if they got anywhere near the bestseller lists, might offend the decent folks.

Links at lexin.

Update: Oh good lord - Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America, by Dr. Nathaniel Frank, has been stripped of its sales rank. "Adult" material, eh?

Open letter at Booksquare. Amazonfail on Twitter.

Petition in protest of Amazon's new anti-queer policy

Tags: amazonfail, angry queer, books are what i read, jeanette winterson, twitter

08:31 pm: The things we do to each other...
From Taking Steps:

The first thing you need to understand is that masculinity, maleness, is inculcated and enforced with violence. It's either actual violence, or the threat of violence, or the implied threat of violence. Constantly. It's how men and boys are taught to train each other into maleness. This is true even at a very, very young age; go to a kindergarten playground, and you will see little boys shaping each others' masculinity, according to the rules they're taught by older boys and by grown men, with violence. It starts very early.

Take a little girl and throw her into that group of boys. Leave her with them and only the instruction, "Do whatever you want with her. Shape her into whatever you want to. Your scalpel is violence." Just sit with that for a minute. The image of handing a little girl who doesn't understand the world yet to a group of boys who are given carte blanche to use violence to shape her into whatever they think is appropriate.

It's a horrifying image. It's hideous and disturbing and wrong and it makes my flesh crawl thinking about it. And that's the way we, as a society, ought to react; if something like this scenario went public, there would be newspaper headlines.

It happens every day. Every hour. But while decent people automatically find this scenario a yawning, shocking evil when the little girl we envision is cissexual, this is considered the normal and proper way to treat a little girl who's trans. I knew I was a girl that early; I was kicked out of preschool for refusing to admit that I was a boy. And then they handed that little girl to the boys for the next fifteen years and said, "Do what you want with her. We will look the other way or cheer you on as you turn her into whatever you want to. Your scalpel is violence. It's only proper if she screams."

Remembering Kaija Seifert.

Tags: angry queer

11:39 am: I got tired of this crap a long time ago
Last Friday I was sitting in a cinema with a bunch of friends and friends of friends, waiting for The Watchmen to begin.

And then the trailer for Lesbian Vampire Killers came on. And in the space of a minute or two, I was reminded that to most of the straight people in this auditorium, I'm just a target. Not a real person. A straight man with an axe planning to kill lesbians is kinda funny, isn't he? All jolly good fun.

I want this film to bomb and die at the box office. I want it more than I can tell you. I want it to be a massive, multi-million loss. I want the makers to quit. I can't avoid the damn posters, I can't avoid the damn trailer: but I can at least want never to see a sequel in the trailers, on the posters, in the papers.

Trying to protest it: hell, what's the point? Pickets, protesting, letters, public anger: I already know what most of the straight people buying tickets to have fun watching lesbians being killed will say: Lighten up. It's just a joke.

None of the lesbians who saw the poster said that. We shrugged at each other resignedly. It's the kind of thing that happens. The boys throw stones in jest: we die in earnest. The dominant narrative about what lesbians are, what we do, why we exist: to titilate and amuse straight men. By dying, if we can't do it any other way.

The only slash panel I got to at Redemption, the dominant narrative had even got there: two people on the panel, one of them a straight man, who began the discussion by saying he didn't know much about slash but he wanted to know where the femslash was.

And for some reason still unclear to me, the audience of slash fans, any of whom were better qualified to sit on the panel than this ass: we told him.

...five minutes into The Watchmen, the only two lesbians in it had been brutally murdered.

[Update: apparently the only critic who liked this piece of crap was the man at the Sun.]
--




Tags: angry queer, films

11:17 pm: Very tired
I walked a lot yesterday. About four pm I was feeling so tired it was ridiculous, and I was a mile from home by the very shortest route. But, I was passing a lovely pub on Leith Walk that a Polish woman took over a year or two ago and I remembered that it now (a) sold good coffee (b) had comfy chairs, and I went in and it still did. It didn't use to be a nice pub: it used to be a standard Leither pub in which men were men, women were women, and drinks were pints.

I ordered a cappuccino and sat down on the comfy red sofa and did not quite go to sleep as I sat: it was my first coffee of the day.

Then I walked home. But I took the mile and a half route.

Today I took no exercise at all. But I did write nearly 2000 words of fiction, and about a thousand words of stuff to do with Proposition 8, which probably convinced no one.

It's not just the friends (and heroes) who are married now whose marriages I want to keep. That's important, of course, but it's also key in same-sex marriage internationally: California and Connecticut and Massachusetts and New York push the US towards equality, towards the time when DOMA will have to be repealed even if Obama doesn't win or wins and reneges on his commitment to repeal.

There are plenty of people around the world for whom there are far more important issues - like staying alive! - than marriage equality. But it never hurts to keep pushing. The closer a country comes to LGBT equality, the more embarrassing it can be made to be when that country fails to support LGBT equality outside its borders.

Which is what I ought to be writing this weekend. Or something like that. The suspense is slightly killing me, actually. Like Mulder, I want to believe.

Tags: angry queer, evil american politics, just my life really

07:25 pm: The Sarah Palin Meme: Free People Read Freely
In the US, it's Banned Books Week. This is the ALA's list for top 100 Banned/Challenged Books in 2000-2007. "Out of 3,869 challenges reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, as compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom does not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges. Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported."

And, in the US, the Republican nominee for Vice President is someone who actively tried to have books banned from her local public library: "While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla [1996–2002] she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin's attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day." - Letter About Palin

Usual rules:

If it's bold, I've read it.
If it's italicised, I've read part of it.
If it's underlined, I'd like to read it.
If it's strikethrough, I don't want to read it - but feel strongly that my dislike doesn't mean other people shouldn't be able to make that decision for themselves.

( The ALA's 100 Most-Banned Books List 2000-2007 )

Tags: angry queer, big read, books are what i read, evil american politics, evil awful mondays, harry potter, imagine better, let's all be outcasts together, lists, meme, outcasts should stick together, powerful speech vs. powerless silence

10:12 pm: Montgomery MacNeil
In 1980, I didn't see Fame. I read the book, a year or so later, and Montgomery MacNeil was the most interesting character in it.

I liked Doris. I liked Lisa. I liked Bruno, even, though he comes across as much more of a spoiled brat in the book. I saw the film on TV, I think. I watched the TV series for a few years - unlike the film, which runs from freshman to senior year, the TV series runs for five years and it's never actually clear what year they're in. Leroy and Ralph I recognised and I like them better as an adult from a safe distance than I ever would have if they had been in my class at school.

Montgomery is gay, and not happy about it. He isn't handsome: he has a wonderful skinny clownish face, frizzy ginger hair: he befriends Doris, and then - as I saw it when I first read the book - as Doris becomes attractive enough to be interesting to Ralph, Doris ceases to be friends with Montgomery in order to be close to Ralph. I liked Montgomery. It never seems to occur to him that being gay could be a source of joy: that any of the students listening to him when he comes out could also be gay. Harvey Milk High School wasn't founded as a safe space for LGBTQI students till 1985: it didn't become an accredited high school till 2002. No one else that we see ever comes out at the New York High School for the Performing Arts: and Montgomery - as far as we can see - never has sex or a romantic relationship with anyone. His first experience of falling in love, he says, is with his analyst.

And he's simply written out of the TV series.

---

I'd forgotten that in the film, Doris and Ralph really do seem to fall in love: but that Montgomery just walks away from them. They forget he's there, and he moves into another room and plays guitar. If Doris had needed an abortion, I bet Montgomery would have been the one to go with her, though, not Ralph. Another thing that happens in the film but not the TV series: the white girl who has an affair with Leroy has an abortion. (She looks miserable about it, and the nurse at the health clinic is absolutely unsympathetic.)

Tags: angry queer, i watch tv

06:18 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.

Tags: angry queer

05:08 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....

Tags: angry queer, orson scott card

08:17 pm: Orson Scott Card: more homophobic raving
Orson Scott Card, homophobic terrorist, against the orderly pursuit of happiness.

Tags: angry queer, i am a feminist

05:45 pm: Heinz writes back
( and makes things worse.... )


( My draft response )

Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan, angry queer, food politics, i watch tv, writing complaining letters

10:39 pm: Kissing Is So Gay


(If by some remote chance you've missed this particular thing, you can ketchup here and here.)

Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan, angry queer, food politics, i watch tv, writing complaining letters

05:49 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.

Tags: angry queer, eating some delicious food, just my life really, seeing friends

12:56 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.

Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan, angry queer, food politics, i watch tv, writing complaining letters

04:10 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.com

1. 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.

Tags: ***** this fir a kerry oan, angry queer, food politics, i watch tv, writing complaining letters