In a recent posting on The Huffington Post, emcee Brother Ali tackles a topic that has been gaining momentum in both queer and mainstream press: homophobia (and, by extension, hatred) in hip hop.

The piece, titled "The Intersection of Homophobia and Hip Hop: Where Tyler Met Frank," is an honest confession of Ali's former ignorance in the usage of the term "faggot" in his lyrics, as well as in his private life. In the opening paragraphs, Ali discusses his own usage of the term:

 

Ali goes on to describe a situation in which a fan overhears (and subsequently contacts him about it) him trying to educate a colleague about the colleague's own homophobia. This is where the piece gets interesting. Ali admits his fault in using "faggot" and more so, acknowledges the fact that even though he is now apologizing for it, his words and music will always be out there.

My use of the f-word more than a decade ago in the song "Dorian" off Shadows On The Sun continued to echo in a space in which I no longer dwelled. That word and that mind-set would continue to be perpetuated through me, a man who had grown to understand more, but whose actions had left an indelible print that could not be erased.[...]My world was pretty small and bleak when I wrote that album. Since then I've been fortunate enough to tour the world, read James Baldwin and develop deep friendships with musicians whom I love and respect and who are openly gay.

In short, the world gave me another chance. But those words are there forever.

Ali goes on to discuss how denigration is used as a way to prove manhood in hip hop and in culture in general. Men are faggots because they don't stand up to culturally or socially appropriate measures of masculinity or heterosexuality. Not because they are gay. And therein lies the explanation around the usage of "faggot" and "gay" by pop culture in general. The argument that when someone says, “That’s gay,” they don’t mean “that’s homosexual in character,” they mean “that’s dumb/stupid/forgettable/ridiculous.” Like when Tyler the Creator reportedly used the term faggot more than 200 times on his album Goblin. I have never made any effort to listen to Tyler’s music. Why? Because I read in the gay press that he used the term all the time. He didn’t lose a fan. He just didn’t gain one.

However, I was (and am) willing to give Tyler the benefit of the doubt, because of his very vocal support for his friend Frank Ocean, who recently came out. Ali, however, is there to remind his readers not to let him off that easy.

When addressing the criticism in an interview with NME, Tyler absolves himself of any responsibility by claiming that he's not aiming the word at gay people in particular, but just using it as a synonym of weakness and stupidity. "I'm not homophobic. I just think 'f****t' hits and hurts people. It hits. And 'gay' just means you're stupid. I don't know, we don't think about it, we're just kids. We don't think about that s--t. But I don't hate gay people. I don't want anyone to think I'm homophobic."

Congratulations, Tyler. You still are homophobic. You may be friends with Frank and defend him and applaud him in the press, but your lyrics and your statement are still homophobic. Because you "don’t think about that shit" is not an excuse. It just makes you intellectually lazy.

It reminds me of that scene in Louis CK's show Louie where he and his friends ask their lone gay comedian buddy about the use of the term faggot. No one wants to stop anyone from expressing their opinions and their ideas. Even when we don't agree with them. Just know what those words mean.

So yeah. Tyler, you didn’t lose a fan, you just lost the opportunity to gain one.

But Ali? You most certainly gained a fan. A vocal one.

The Atlantic recently posted a story by Andy Isaacson on their website and their Tumblr entitled, "Can a Better Vibrator Inspire an Age of Great American Sex?"

I think it can.

There is often a great irony that happens in most discussions around sex. We, as humans in the 21st century, have greater and more access to information about sex and human sexuality than perhaps any other society. Thanks to studies, discussions and dissertations, as well as pop culture and pornography, we are more prone to discuss sex openly.

But how are we talking about sex, and sex toys?

We're still tittering and giggling while we do it.

Remember the episode of Sex in the City where Carrie and the girls discover the Rabbit?

Sure, the episode brought a certain degree of honesty in the discussion around sex toys -- they're fun, they're sexy, they make you feel good -- but by the end of the episode, the vibrator becomes a joke/crutch for Charlotte, who can't seem to stop using it.

Sex toys are called toys because they are fun. Why do we chastise people who want to have fun, and do it in creative ways? Because maybe they know something the rest of you don't: how to respond to their own bodies and the bodies of their partners in imaginative ways. Sex toys aren't a crutch for the lonely and horny; they are a way of opening one's sexual realm and possibilities.

The key here -- and in the previously stated article -- is in discussing what works and what doesn't work when it comes to sex and sex toys. Designers look into how bodies respond to various stimuli and build better sex toys. Conversely, we, as people who have sex (and consumers of these products), can have discussions as to what we like and what we want. When we can do that, we will all have better sex lives.

 

No, really he does.

On last night's segment of The Ridiculist on Anderson Cooper 360, Cooper decides to deride Dyngus Day.

Apparently Dyngus Day is a real thing, a day celebrated mostly by people of Polish origin, to celebrate the end of Lent. Cooper keeps it together rather well during his segment, but upon the mention of pussy willows, he loses his shit and starts to giggle. For over a minute. Though "titter" really is the better word, don't you think?

It reminds me of a scene in John Waters' Serial Mom. 

I can never look at pussy willows seriously since I saw that movie. And now, since I have seen that moment, perhaps, even Anderson Cooper. Because he titters like a girl. But then again, when I can't stop laughing, I sound like Muttley from Wacky Races.

Personally, I hope Anderson has a really good sense of humour and puts himself on The Ridiculist for his laugh. I'll gladly join him.

Last week The Gossip dropped their new single, "Perfect World," with a video detailing the lyrics.

Now, the actual video has been released and it's a visual love poem to Beth Ditto and her powers as a vocalist.

It seems like everyone is releasing "lyrics" videos for their singles. Cee-Lo Green used it to full effect a while back with "Fuck You." Now the Scissor Sisters have used this format to release their new single, produced by Calvin Harris and Alex Ridha, aka Boys Noize. It's a mix of glam, filter disco and synth silliness. Not a bad way to whet appetites for new Scissor Sisters material.

Twenty years ago today, a young man with a pockmarked face and a self-effacing manner passed away.

Today, that man is name-dropped among music lovers of genres from hip hop to house to disco to new wave to experimental. His name is Arthur Russell.

Russell was a New York fixture, adored and ignored. He worked with everyone from Philip Glass to Larry Levan to Allen Ginsberg. He played the cello, but he also made some of the funkiest and craziest disco records you've ever heard. He is one of the legions of composers and artists who are constantly being rediscovered by crate diggers and music historians and aficionados. There are even documentaries and books devoted to Russell's life. His record "Is It All Over My Face," recorded under the Loose Joints moniker on West End records, is arguably his most famous. To write it out and describe it doesn't pay the record justice. It starts with a simple four-on-the-floor beat, nothing too fast. A jangly guitar comes in, grooving alongside jazzy keys. It's a sustained intro, when all of a sudden, a woman starts to sing. But when you listen to it, your head starts to bop, you get stuck in the groove. It's dirty, it's sexy but it's polished. It's disco for intellectual sex pigs.

Russell was one of those people who was never fully satisfied with his compositions, at least, not until he was able to tweak it in as many ways as he could. He re-recorded many of his compositions, including "All Over My Face," this time with a male vocal. Another of his big hits, "Go Bang" was tweaked and reworked. At first listen, you wouldn't think that dean of disco Nicky Siano had his paws all over this record. It sounds like it should be played at a punk bar made for gay disco queens. But again, it's the idiosyncracies that make it work.

But Russell wasn't just a lover of dance music. He is also known for his cello compositions, such as this one, "Keeping Up," which features Russell himself on vocals. Quiet, earnest and reserved. His work has been cited as an influence for such contemporary composers such as Jens Lekman and The Hidden Cameras' Joel Gibb.

It's hard to decide which Russell I prefer: the soft, sensitive man who played his cello or the gregarious guy who made us all bang. In the end, it doesn't matter. He is no longer with us, so we pay our respects in the best way we can: by listening intently.

 

Every day I wake up, and I read.

I turn on my computer and check my RSS feeds: queer news, international news, arts news, etc. It's what you do when you work as a writer/journalist/blogger. You read to keep up with the world, see what's going on, keep current.

Readers will recognize that often, I will write an op-ed or a short blurb about something I found online. I like to share. But I want to share a little bit more.

In that capacity, here is the first "Reading List," a small collection of curated links to stories that interest queers and the people who love (and write about) them.

First off, an article by pornstar/writer Conner Habib, published on Salon. Habib presents a rather personal (and PG-13 masturbatory) story about discovering his sexuality at highway rest stops. The story is interesting in and of itself, as cruising as a concept is rarely discussed within "mainstream" media, let alone the discussion of men who have sex with men who don't identify as (and possibly don't identify what they're doing as) being gay. He describes it almost like a secret society, all based on sex. He writes:

Once I saw a bag of condoms nailed to a tree with a sign that read, “Be Safe Guys.” It was a kind gesture, but it somehow felt like an intrusion. Because these places weren’t quite places, they weren’t destinations; not for most people. They were away from hookup websites, away from houses, bars, clubs, lives — removed from the world. And when the world crept in, it made the experience less real, less itself.

And although I generally advise against reading comments in such stories, in this case, the comments are almost as entertaining as the story itself. Especially the incredulity at the discovery that such a thing/act/subculture exists.

*

During the late '80s and early '90s, many gay male writers began publishing what became known as "AIDS novels": personal stories, both fictional and factual, about how the disease was affecting gay men. The genre died down during the mid-'90s, (books as Dale Peck's Martin and John, published in 1993 is often considered to be one of the first "post-AIDS novel" novels, and the end of the era) and AIDS and AIDS-related stories became less and less read, or considered.

This week, The Atlantic published a first-person account of living with a partner with HIV, or serodiscordance. Read it.

*

Last, but certainly not least, I found an old article that the NYT published a short piece about men who wear heels.

Image by Amy Dickerson for NYT

The NYT has always tried to be on top of trends, but really, men wearing heels isn't that new, and it wasn't then.

However, inspired by the idea of men in heels, allow me to offer you a little weekend office dance party, courtesy of Alien Alien.

I have a confession to make: I love television talent competitions.

Ot at least, the Got Talent series.  

I mean, I loathe all of the Idol series and can't even deal with the schaudenfreude that is the audition process, but in the case of *'s Got Talent, I do admit, I love to watch them. And yes, I do tear up on occasion. 

But this is not about things that make one tear up. It is about things that make us smile.

Case in point: last week on Citytv's Canada's Got Talent, the boys from Boylesque TO performed a rather cheeky -- I'm looking at you, Wrong Note Rusty -- number for the judges (fast forward to the 35:50 mark to see what the boys were up to), including a little glimpse of some beautiful buttocks. The boys have made it through to the next round, and I can't wait to see what they'll pull out of their sleeves/tear-away pants/cummerbunds/jockstraps.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the original version of the show, Britain's Got Talent, has also proved to be rather queer-friendly, with an audition by two male ballroom dancers.

I will admit that I am not a great fan of ballroom dancing. I don't really get how it has become such a huge phenom, especially in the case of Dancing with the Stars. And the performance by these two gentlemen is rife with kitsch and schmaltz, as they dance to "You Raise Me Up" (I vomit a little in my mouth when I hear that song). But the fact that they can still make someone like Simon Cowell smile, even though you know he wants to roll his eyes at the camp-ness of it all (as did I, a little bit), is a testament to the earnestness they present. It's not about how well they dance or the two of them being a "gay dancing duo." It is an obvious and honest expression of hard work and dedication presented by two people who love each other. And for that, I will applaud them. Just don't use that song again, please.

If you read this blog, then you know I have a great love for the website/blog Gawker. I’m not here to write an open letter telling them how much I love them, but if I did, it would probably be directed to Brian Moylan.

Why? Because of this:

Image via Gawker

It all started about a week ago when news that Grindr, the social networking/cruising app for men who have sex with men had been hacked in Australia. People worried about their personal information being leaked, including conversations and pics that had been distributed via the app. (On a side note, looks like the person who hacked the app will not be prosecuted, or at least not at the time of this posting.)

Meanwhile, in a less sexually explicit realm of the internet (does such a thing exist?), Google has announced that it is getting rid of all its individual privacy policies for the various services that it maintains and will soon institute one umbrella policy for all. What does this mean? That Google can use the information you post in any of its various sites, programs, etc and use that to create ads that will be specific to you. Oh, and if you live under an online rock, Facebook is making its Timeline feature a permanent and non-negotiable part of your browsing experience, making all those stupid things you and your friends said on your wall in the past few years easily available for all to see.

In other words, people are starting to realize the permanence and permeability of online life. Just because what you said isn’t directly in front of your screen doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist somewhere, or that someone can stumble across it pretty easily. Christ, I once found stuff I had written on a listserv back in 1995 (don’t bother looking; it was under an alias). Things don’t disappear into the ether.

Five days after the Grindr story broke, writer Brian Moylan did something I don’t believe any other journalist or blogger has done before. He posted his Grindr profile on the web, for all to see. Comments on the story were generally positive, with the occasional doubt cast on the veracity of his stats – “All true”, he laughs. Opinions ranged from, “Wow, you're hot. Like, I would literally drag my dick through a mile of broken glass just to beat off to your shadow,” to “Dude - 6'2" and 150 lbs. I hope you get some hits on Grindr - you really need some protein.”

In the text accompanying it, Moylan jokingly admits to “whoring himself out” for viewing hits – he and his co-workers are having a contest to see who can get the most hits – but then he goes on to say something very telling:

“I'd like to say that putting the little ad I use to advertise myself on Grindr, a popular iPhone app that ranks gay men looking to meet other men for encounters of all sorts based on their proximity to the user, is some sort of comment about transparency. Since I would totally swipe a famous gay person's Grindr photo and put it on the Internet, I should make my own available.”

So I emailed Moylan and asked him for an interview. He said yes but that his schedule was busy. After missed phone calls and a few back-and-forth emails, I got him on the phone as he was waking up. “It’s raining in New York, and I’m still in bed,” he says as he stretches. When I asked him about the post in question and his reasons for posting it, he said, “I thought it would be fun and funny. And you know, I totally would, if I found George Michael on Grindr, I would totally take a screenshot of it and put it on the internet for everyone to see. If I would do it, why should my profile be off-limits?”

And there it is. Although Moylan considers himself to be more of a writer than a journalist – although he has worked in journalism, notably for the gay newspaper The Washington Blade – he’s simply pointing out that the online world is a very public one. Just because you’re alone on your computer doesn’t mean you’re not in a public sphere. If Facebook can log all your chats and Google can send you ads based on the content of your emails, then putting your photo and having conversations on smartphone-based applications is just another dimension of the public realm.

Moylan is realistic about what his online presence means in terms of his own private life. “There are some things that I will show on the internet and some things that are just for people who are close to me. I don’t talk about my family online, just 'cause. That’s not my place to share it.” He jokes that his father often reads his work, and in this particular instance, explaining what Grindr is and how it works was “a little bit of an uncomfortable conversation to have, but in the great realm of things, it wasn’t too bad.”

Moylan himself admits to having people occasionally recognize him from his work on Gawker when he uses the app. But he likens it to being seen in any public arena. “It’s like going to a department store,” he says. “If someone sees you in a department store, you can’t be like, 'Oh, yeah, I don’t go to this department store,' because you’re there! It’s like going to a gay bar; just as many people can see you. And yeah, I go to gay bars all the time and I go to Grindr all the time.”

When discussing the issues around media personalities putting their personal, social or even artistic lives online – Sook Yin Lee almost losing her job comes to mind - Moylan isn’t concerned. “There are things I have said about people in the media industry that I think have probably been far more damaging to my career prospects,” he says. “I’ve probably pissed off a number of people who may have hired me in the future. I feel like that is more dangerous to my future employment prospects than the fact that people may or may not know I go on Grindr.”

We’ve all done it. We’ve all put our faces, personal information (and possibly more) on everything from personal ads to blogs to Tumblr posts to Facebook pages. Although we as a society are often kvetching about the lack of online privacy, I think we are arguably more suspect than those we seek to blame. Besides, who’s the one posting all this information? Really, we’re just giving it away. We treat our personal information like trash on the side of the road. We shouldn’t be surprised when someone enacts the “finders keepers” rule. But within that same frame, I think it’s time we give each other a bit more of a break when we are open about ourselves and our lives online. It's hard to fault someone for doing something that we also do, have done or would do. So I applaud Brian Moylan for posting his Grindr profile on Gawker. Now, if only a certain silver fox anchor would do so . . .

Maybe during sweeps week.

Context: Watch this video.

To the person who posted this video,

When I was a teenager during the '90s, I didn’t have access to the internet in the same way you do. I didn’t have the capacity to express myself to an entire world of people. I can’t imagine what it feels like to open yourself up in that way.

This is not to say that I didn’t express myself. I did. And in very public ways. But my public was small, while yours is grand.

I can’t imagine what it was like for you, the moment when you posted this video. Or the moments in which you waited for the first hits to happen. I can’t imagine what it was like when your schoolmates found this video. When your teachers saw it. What it was like when the media picked it up. What it’s like now that it’s gone viral.

You mention that kids have been bullying you since elementary school. I can relate. It started for me at the same time. My second day of school, in fact.

I don’t know if you’re real. This is the internet after all. But for the sake of argument, let’s say you are. I hope you are. Because I have something to tell you.

You’re doing exactly what you need to be doing. You’re asking people to listen. The people who listen may not always be the people you want, but in there, in that big wide world out there, people are listening to you. And they will respond to you if you want them to.

We are out there. We are you, and of you, and will help you.

I would tell you that if you want help, all you have to do is ask.

But you just did.

And that is the hardest, most beautiful thing to do.

Kudos to Catherine Galliford, the RCMP officer who has taken it upon herself to voice what she has seen and experienced as the head of the Missing Women’s Task Force in Vancouver.

The Province recently posted a story about Galliford, who is slated to testify in January at the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. Galliford gave a statement to the RCMP totalling 115 pages, which included her claim that the RCMP had enough evidence to ask for a search warrant to search Robert Pickton’s farm in 1999. Pickton’s farm was not raided until 2002. She herself was subjected to ridicule and insults. According to The Province:

The officers, Galliford alleged, wanted to tell her about “their fantasy.”

“They wanted to see Willie Pickton escape from prison, track me down and strip me naked, string me up on a meat hook and gut me like a pig,” said Galliford, who also recounted the episode in her formal statement to RCMP.

The worst part about all of this is that I’m not really surprised by any of the information that I’m reading. There are many issues at stake with this investigation, including violence against women, as well as the treatment of First Nations women. But this did get me thinking about images and ideas around sex workers, specifically within law enforcement and the media. Note: this is not to ignore the other issues or to disavow that these three separate issues are not often connected. I also do not wish to make sweeping generalizations that all the women who were murdered by Pickton were sex workers, but it is known that many of them were. 

Sex workers are often portrayed and viewed by police officials – as well as the mainstream media – as victims or criminals or both. This is problematic at best. One of the main issues in discussions about the sex trade is a lack of knowledge – a bias I admit to and am working to diminish by informing myself about issues related to sex work.

It is a bias that I would argue many journalists are subject to, without even being conscious of it, let alone understanding it. The fact that the word “hooker” is still used by many mainstream media outlets is another example of the lack of knowledge and respect that many people in the sex trade deal with.

To expect that a law enforcement agency would make the effort to understand its own biases is laughable to some and unfortunate to all who are subject to it. If we are to talk of victimization, then I would argue that Galliford was a victim of this bias, as were the women – both counted and uncounted – who fell to Pickton.

****

A final thought: the irony is not lost on me that the day The Province posted this story, Xtra posted the story of Gerald Hannon, who was a sex worker, announcing his “retirement” from the industry in what is a positive description about sex work, with an interview conducted by someone in the trade.