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Reactions to Lily
God knows I don’t need to write anything further in terms of parsing the Lily Allen video, so I’ll largely refrain. Instead I want to note a few things about the reaction to it. The response of the...
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Something Rotten: Mugabe’s Son, Tom Daley and Gay Identity
We’ve seen before how quickly and widely misinformation can spread if it fits the right narrative. This is undoubtedly true in broad terms but I’ve tended to write about it with a particular,...
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12 Years A Slave and racism in the UK
I saw 12 Years A Slave a few months ago at the London Film Festival. I liked it well enough – it’s well-made, features some brilliant performances and proved engrossing. I wasn’t, however, as blown...
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Some Quick Thoughts on Channel 4’s Hunted
I tried not to pre-judge Hunted, an edition of Channel 4’s Dispatches about homophobia in Russia, broadcast tonight. I really did. Yet having just watched it I have to attempt to articulate the despair...
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The Real Cynicism Behind E-Petitions
I’ve already made my feelings about e-petitions clear and don’t wish to repeat my complaints but, dear God, I feel like I’m drowning in the fucking things. Increasingly it seems like the first...
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Tom Daley, Jessie J and the Certainty of Boxes
We really, really don’t like it when people don’t fit neatly into boxes we understand. Boxes which, for one reason or another, we’ve been led to believe are ‘acceptable’, ‘normal’ and ‘the way things...
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The Sun, UKIP and Racism
The Sun’s ‘attack’ on UKIP homophobia was today shared approvingly in some quarters (‘Nice one, Sun’). This is utterly absurd. The Sun should never, ever be applauded for ‘opposing’ homophobia – it...
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The Next Four
“The first five patients were white,” remembered Gottlieb. “The next two were black. The sixth patient was a Haitian man. The 7th patient was a gay African-American man, here in Los Angeles.” It is...
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Soft Power, CSR, Pride and Global Sports Events
Episode One: Soft Power, CSR, Pride and Global Sports Events by The_Kit_And_Sam_Podcast on Mixcloud This podcast from Kit (@KitCaless) and Sam (@AngrySamPoet) is on a series of related subjects close...
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‘Civilised’
With the Commonwealth Games starting in Glasgow this week, the usual suspects have been out in force complaining about homophobia in many of the Commonwealth countries. Never one to shy from the...
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Pop Deserves the ‘Social Justice Warriors’
Don’t worry, I’m not really going to write about the racism/appropriation in the new Taylor Swift video. This widely shared post says most of what there is to say (and, importantly, what needed to be...
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Is this what we’ve done to ourselves?
Just pick up a copy of the Sun. Is this Britain? Is this what we’ve done to ourselves? How can the people who work on that paper go home and face their families without any sense of shame? I’d be...
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Boycotts and Kiss-Ins: On LGBT Microaggressions
The media absolutely loves stories of microaggressions (and sometimes just plain aggressions) faced by LGBT people in the service industry. Whether it’s being asked to stop kissing in Sainsbury’s,...
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2014 – The Year of Nationalism
My first blog post in 2014 was about the Scottish independence referendum and nationalism – topics which came to dominate my writing over the year and which I’ll no doubt continue to write on. On the...
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The ‘Respectable’ Queer
One of the things which previously inspired me to write on why I thought ‘gay art’ was at a dead end was seeing a ‘film’ by someone called Antonio Da Silva. This consisted of 14 minutes of naked men...
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The Best in Us
Any gay person will recognise, on a visceral level, the dynamic around the ‘little things’ which Panti Bliss describes in this video. We will also recognise what she says later about it becoming so...
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Cars For All The Gays!
I’ve written a lot in the past few years on how gay identity has been commodified as it has concomitantly become ‘respectable’ and divorced from the wider social justice movement which was once...
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Same-sex Marriage Supporters Can Be Dickheads Too
Last month Barclays was handed the ‘largest ever’ bank fine in UK history over its role in rigging foreign exchange (forex) markets and ripping-off customers. This is, of course, only the latest...
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Solidarity Betrayed: UKIP and Pride
This is Ruth Hunt, Chief Executive of Stonewall, commenting on the UKIP at Pride debacle which has unfolded over the past few days. You will search in vain for an actual position on this from the UK’s...
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Pride is Political: Jennicet Gutiérrez and UKIP
I said yesterday that had Jennicet Gutiérrez‘s protest at President Obama’s Pride Month address been a work of fiction, it would have been widely viewed as being too on-the-nose in its symbolism....
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