Xavier Naidoo will no longer represent Germany in next year’s competition after the public backlash led to a reevaluation of the nomination. “It was certain that he’d polarise, but we were surprised by the forceful reactions. We misjudged this,” German broadcast coordinator said. Read more
Russia: A List Of “Gays We Respect”
In an article headlined “Gays We Respect,” the Russian edition of men’s magazine Maxim has “forgiven” a list of famous actors, authors and musicians for their sexual orientation, including Ian McKellen and Neal Patrick Harris.
“We, men, do not consider men who love men to be men. This is the rule,” the introduction to the post reads. “But there are exceptions. There are gays who have earned our respect and the right to remain real men in our eyes.”
An editor at Maxim’s Russian edition told BuzzFeed News Nov. 26 “our position is clearly formulated in the introduction to the article.” Alexander Malenkov, the editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Maxim, told the Russian News Service Nov. 30, “This is a joke article. It says so in it.” Nowhere in the text is it made clear that the article is meant to be a parody. The magazine has updated the post with a link added to the introduction, placed on the word “gays,” which leads to an article from 2013 about homosexuality.
“We are deeply disturbed by the article in Maxim Russia and fully condemn it,” a spokesperson for Maxim said.
US: College sports officials will reconsider cities chosen to host championships
Amid a national debate over civil rights protections based on sexual orientation, the Indianapolis-based NCAA apparently will reconsider sites already chosen to host its championships — including Indianapolis, the NCAA announced.
“We’ll continue to review current events in all cities bidding on NCAA championships and events, as well as cities that have already been named as future host sites, such as Indianapolis,” Bob Williams, NCAA senior vice president for communications, wrote. Requests to speak to NCAA leaders for more information were denied.
Among the Indianapolis events that could be in jeopardy is the NCAA’s richest showcase — the men’s basketball Final Four — slated to return to the city in 2021. The same event held here this year pumped an estimated $71 million into the local economy, according to Visit Indy. Indianapolis also is scheduled to host first- and second-round games in the 2017 men’s basketball tournament.
The NCAA statement about future and scheduled sites comes after Houston voters this month repealed an ordinance that banned discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. Read more via IndyStar
US: The cruel HIV stalking of Charlie Sheen takes us back to the ignorant 1980s
Charlie Sheen has officially come out as HIV positive. He was forced to do so in the wake of shrill tabloid reporting that harkened back to the worst HIV-related ignorance and bullying of the 1980s.
It feels like the 1980s, because of the nature of the speculation, which is purely prurient about Sheen basically being a man-slut, and how many people he has infected with HIV—and how knowingly has he done so, without disclosing his status to them. Suddenly, in my mind, Sheen seems like the kind of hunted man Rock Hudson became, as cameras followed him being shuttled on and off planes as he became sicker and sicker. The media likes nothing more than an ailing star—even better if HIV and AIDS means the story gets front-loaded with all kinds of judgment about their “lifestyle,” sexual and otherwise.
This obviously takes it as a given that Sheen’s right to privacy has been thoroughly trampled, and that this is somehow acceptable: He has been smoked out of the closet. The Enquirer, seeing their scoop slip through their fingers, has a feverish front page, the result of much investigation, which promises to expose the “Ex-Lovers’ Horror—Did He Infect Them?” Plus: “He’s Slept With Thousands of Women—And Men!”
The headline is a throwback too—to conflating HIV, a virus, and AIDS, the disease that it can lead to, although much less frequently today than it did back then because of advances in HIV drug treatment, which Sheen himself has reportedly started. Read more via The Daily Beast
Nigeria: Coming out, ‘Hate, isolation, loneliness may come’
Among trends that produce change, the process of coming out is one that can subtly persuade a society of the importance of recognizing the human rights of LGBTI people. When enough friends, colleagues, family members and celebrities come out, fear and hatred of LGBTI people tend to dissolve.
But for an individual, coming out can be risky, especially in an intensely homophobic country. Mike Daemon, host of the Nigeria-based No Strings podcasts, highlights those risks in the podcasts’ latest episode, titled “Should I come out?”
“It’s a life-changing decision,” he says of coming out. But “how safe will you be when this decision is finally made?” Some Nigerian parents have turned a son over to police after learning that he is gay, he says. Read more via 76Crimes
South Africa: Lobola from a gay perspective
Not only did loving couple Sape ‘Moude’ Maodi and Antoinette ‘Vaivi’ Swartz have to overcome prejudice against their relationship because they are both women, but the issue of paying lobola once they decided to get married was another challenge for them and their families.
Lobola is traditionally considered to be an exchange between a man and a woman and their families, with the woman often being the recipient of the lobola. Ten years after the decision to legalise gay marriage in South Africa, there appears to be a slight shift in some traditional circles around homosexuality. Prof Pitika Ntuli at Tshwane University of Technology said that being gay does not exclude one from being African. “If you look at isangoma, you see that homosexual practises are common,” he said.
Sape and Vaivi wished from the start of their relationship in 2009, to express their love publicly and do so in a traditional way that reflects their culture. On the day of the lobola negotiations in 2012, Sape’s family acknowledged to the ancestors that what was happening was something new, reassured them they have seen two women and admitted they were yet to learn. Read more via the Citizen
US: Safe place program rolls out to Starbucks stores in Seattle
One of the first things Jim Ritter did when he became LGBTQ liaison officer for the Seattle Police Department earlier this year was to page through reports of hate crimes. The numbers indicated a possible modest uptick in attacks and menacing behavior aimed at the gay community. Anecdotally, however, Ritter was encountering something very different.
“I’m getting calls from people saying it had happened to them or their friends,” Ritter recalled. “I’m getting calls from people and they’re not matching up with the reports I have. I’d say, ‘Well, did you report these?’ and they’d say no. It was clear to me that this was a huge problem for us, because if we don’t know about it we can’t devote resources to it.”
That realization that hate crimes were more frequent than the numbers indicated prompted Ritter to create the Seattle Police Department Safe Place program. Designed to identify plentiful safe and secure places for victims of anti-LGBTQ-related crimes and harassment, SPD Safe Place’s mission is intentionally uncomplicated. Window clings with the program’s rainbow logo are circulated to Seattle area businesses and public facilities identifying them as places where staff who’ve received SPD Safe Place training will call 911 and allow victims to remain on the premises until police arrive. Read more via Starbucks
UK: LGBT tech workers to gather at Facebook to ‘MakeStuffBetter’
InterTech, the UK-based LGBT network for those who work in the tech industries, have announced that its next event will be a #MakeStuffBetter Holiday Hackathon at the offices of Facebook in Euston, London.
The 24-hour event will run from on Saturday 12 December. They’re wanting tech workers who can aid in the creation of products that may spread tolerance, promote health or create awareness.
Previous hackathons have led to the creation of the LGBT Whip, a website that allows you to check on the voting record of MPs, and online, stereotype-questioning game Hansel in Distress. Read more via Gay Star News
Some top-ranked companies on LGBT scorecard work in harshly anti-LGBT nations
Companies doing business in countries with harsh anti-LGBT laws are among the top scorers in the Human Rights Campaign’s first ever corporate LGBT scorecard to consider international operations alongside domestic ones. HRC launches its 14th annual Corporate Equality Index, which scores hundreds of companies on measures like health insurance coverage for transgender workers and employee benefits for employees’ same-sex partners.
Only one area that employers were scored on this year actually applied to work overseas: whether the company has a nondiscrimination policy covering LGBT workers that applies throughout its global operations. Some of the companies that met this requirement have operations in countries that not only make same-sex relationships or wearing non-gender conforming clothing illegal, but actively seek out LGBT people for arrest, have extreme jail sentences or flogging as penalties, or criminalize support for LGBT rights.
In such countries, invoking a company’s nondiscrimination protections might require LGBT employees to out themselves to company officers in a way that could expose them to arrest or extortion. That could mean policies on paper have little effect on the ground, or might force companies into difficult confrontations with local governments. Read more via Buzzfeed
Asia: Global HIV targets ‘could be derailed’ by hook up apps
A new UN report cites the boom in hook-up apps as one of the drivers of a worsening HIV epidemic in Asia. The report found that HIV infections had surged among young people, aged 10-19, in the Asia-Pacific region.
Analysing data from Thailand, it notes: “Bangkok’s intensifying HIV epidemic among young MSM is largely a result of extensive sexual risk-taking, a higher number of partners, overall increased biological vulnerability through unprotected anal sex with an HIV positive partner, low uptake of HIV testing, and an earlier age of first sex – frequently in the low to mid-teens.
“The explosion of smartphone gay dating apps has expanded the options for casual spontaneous sex as never before – mobile app users in the same vicinity (if not the same street) can locate each other and arrange an immediate sexual encounter with a few screen touches.” Read more via PinkNews
Grindr and World AIDS Day 2015
When we created Grindr for Equality, we envisioned education and support for sexual health in addition to our work for LGBTQ rights. Today, World AIDS Day, we proudly recommit to these efforts, which exist in a four-pronged plan for your health. In the latter half of 2015, we took a deep dive into the third piece of this plan, as we sought to understand our users’ experience with pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP.
So along with our partners at the San Francisco AIDS Foundation (SFAF) and with help from the Center for Disease Control and the Gilead science team, we fielded a survey and heard from Grindr users who shared their experiences. We’re very excited here to be able to share a little bit of what we found. Read more via Grindr
Grindr and other hook-up apps offer free adverts to HIV testing service
Three dating apps popular with gay and bisexual men – Grindr, Hornet and Planet Romeo – have announced that they are to host free advertising to promote a new, mobile-optimized European HIV Test Finder.
The test finder was devised by Aidsmap and lists over 2,000 HIV testing centers and clinics in all 28 EU countries. The initiative has been organized by a pan-country group of HIV organizations, including Terrence Higgins Trust in the UK, Soak Aids in the Netherlands and RSFL (Sweden), the European Centre of Disease Prevention, among others.
Dr Andrew Amato-Gauci, Head of the ECDC Programme on HIV/AIDS, STI and viral hepatitis said in a statement: ‘Across Europe, 47 per cent of newly reported HIV cases are diagnosed late although we know that those tested early are a lot less likely to pass the virus on to others because of both lower infectivity when on treatment and changes in sexual and drug injecting behavior.
‘Whether on your computer or on your mobile phone, with the European HIV Test Finder it will only take you a few seconds to locate a testing site near you – wherever you are in Europe.” Read more via Gay Star News