If you were curious about the practical implications of Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act, signed yesterday by President Yoweri Museveni, look no further than its Red Pepper newspaper, which has published the identities of what it deems the country's "200 Top Homos" on its cover. If you thought the law banning gay sex would exist only in the realm of gay sex, you were wrong. This is a war on gay people.
Today, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni signed the Anti-Homosexuality Act, a wide-ranging bill that imposes seven years in jail for "the offense of homosexuality" (gay sex) and lifetime in jail for "aggravated homosexuality," which describes an array of offenses like incest, sex with a minor, and sex with a person with a disability. Uganda's The Observer reports, "The bill will formally become law when it gets published in the Uganda Gazette. That, however, remains a formality. For Uganda's largely anti-gay population, the most important part was the president's signature."
For the last two weeks, the most radical voice inside Sochi's Olympic stadiums was a wardrobe.
Is Arizona set to become an "anti-gay Jim Crow" state? A week after Kansas nearly made law a bill proposing to legalize discrimination against gays on the basis of freedom of religion, a similar bill passed in Arizona last night, leaving Governor Jan Brewer five days to decide where to go from here.
The Arizona Senate voted in favor of a measure that would allow business owners the right to refuse gays service based on religious beliefs. "This bill is not about discrimination," Sen. Steve Yarbrough said. "It's about preventing discrimination against people who are clearly living out their faith." Related.
First, the good news: A bill approved Wednesday by the Kansas House of Representatives by a vote of 72 to 49 that would allow for Jim Crow-style anti-gay discrimination seems unlikely to pass even in the Republican-controlled Senate, according to Senate President Susan Wagle.
Yoruba Richen's documentary The New Black (opening today at New York's Film Forum) achieves what seemed impossible before it: It examines the generalized notion that the black community is homophobic with specificity and subtlety. Using the backdrop of the fight for marriage equality in Maryland in 2012 (where it was eventually approved by voters), Richen's film examines both sides of the debate within the black community by primarily using the National Black Justice Coalition Sharon J. Lettman-Hicks to represent the pro-equality side, and Maryland Marriage Alliance's Derek McCoy as the face of the anti-equality side.
Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a dispatch from the "north Nigeria metropolis" of Bauchi, Nigeria, where, as it was reported last month, dozens of gay men were arrested in the wake of the so-called "Jail the Gays" bill. The Times reports that 10 men accused of being gay are being held in Bauchi's central prison.
In the Vlad TV interview above, rapper turned singing AutoTune addict T-Pain calls homophobia "terrible" and "weird," says he doesn't "fuck with" people who shun gays, and claims to know artists who won't work with Frank Ocean because he once wrote a Tumblr post about falling in love with a man. Throughout, T-Pain is seemingly tipsy and decidedly animated, which makes his entire spiel delightful. I mean, there's plenty to get offended over here, if you wish to nitpick, so don't fret. T-Pain will give you something to do if you're bored and looking to get mad.
If you want to know about gay people—their lives, their desires, their ideas, their cultures—listen to gay people. If you want to know about straight people, listen to straight people talking about gay people.
Last night, the U.K.'s Channel 4 aired Hunted, a wide-ranging documentary about homophobia in Russia. Its biggest coup was achieving access to the inner workings of Occupy Pedophilia, the largest vigilante group responsible for the hunting down of, physical abuse against, and public humiliation of gay people (predominantly gay men). Though such footage has been making the rounds, this is the first time I've seen the planning and luring process of the group. Via the third-party cameras, we also get a sense of how long such an ordeal lasts (an hour). Though mild in violence, the footage above is as hard to watch as the rest of this stuff, so proceed with caution.
This account of an affair between two men who played together on the Washington Redskins in the late '60s/early '70s is heartbreaking. It comes from the NFL Network's episode of A Football Life profiling player Jerry Smith, who remained publicly closeted for his entire life (Smith died of AIDS in 1986).
Yesterday, Esquire's culture blog posted a review of the new HBO show that is just like your life or your friend's life or the life of that guy in your office whose shoes are always just a little nicer than they have to be, Looking. In "A Straight Man's Guide to HBO's Looking," writer Mick Stingley determines that the show about a handful of weed-paced gay friends in San Francisco "commits the heinous sin of being gay and boring." Stingley's bio that follows his piece states that he "loves Tom Wolfe and rock and roll and lives with his fiancée in Queens." He seems to have a lot in common with those gay guys on the show with the exception of the gay thing. Boring is the universal human experience.
On Saturday, One Direction member Liam Payne tweeted "huge love to your family" at Willie Robertson of the A&E hit show Duck Dynasty.
