British Deny Alan Turing Pardon for “Gross Indecency”
You may not have heard of Alan Turing, but you should know who he is. He’s a gay icon, computer science great, and war hero. He was instrumental in winning World War 2 and invented the Turing Machine. These days, Turing Machines are called computers.
Alan Turing was born in 1912 in London, England. In 1936, he wrote a paper describing a Turing Machine, which laid out the conceptual template for a fully functional modern computer (on which I’m writing this and you’re reading this). During World War 2, Turing worked at Bletchley park, the Allied code-breaking HQ. While there, he was instrumental in breaking the German Engima code, and in doing so, allowed the allied to eavesdrop on German communications. And win the war.
Turing was gay and proudly so. And for that he was punished severely.
Loading ...Gay Airman Randy Phillips on Why He Came Out on YouTube
Gay Airman Randy Phillips has become a YouTube celebrity since coming out. But why did he decide to come out on YouTube? The DailyDot has the scoop. Phillips knew he needed to come out, and decided YouTube was the best way to do it. “It was the easiest way for me to do it. I thought it was easiest just to convey my message through YouTube instead of actually blogging,” he told the DailyDot.
He started off last Spring:
He shot his first dozen videos, recorded last spring, neck down to conceal his identity, his voice and hands standing in for facial expressions. The videos were shot in a southwest Asian country that Phillips couldn’t reveal (one of those “hot and sandy ones”), captured a clearly nervous Phillips talking about being gay in the military.
Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenney: Entropy Parade
Artists Slava Mogutin and Brian Kenney (who are both artistic collaborators as well as spouses), create this portfolio called Entropy Parade for Flaunt magazine.
Cynthia Nixon on Being In Lesbian Relationship
As most of you know, Cynthia Nixon, known (among her many roles) as Sex and the City’s Miranda, is in a relationship with a woman. In a wide ranging interview, the New York Times asked her about “skepticism… her relationship has sparked among some gay activists who find her midlife switch in sexual orientation disingenuous.”
“I totally reject that,” she said heatedly. “I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me. A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.” Her face was red and her arms were waving. “As you can tell,” she said, “I am very annoyed about this issue. Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.”
Read the entire story in the New York Times.
[Photo via Wikipedia.]
Grindr Hacked
A hacker in Sydney compromised Grindr, “potentially exposing intimate personal chats, explicit photos and private information of users,” according to the Sydney Morning Herald, who first reported on the incident. “The hacker discovered a way to log in as another user, impersonate that user, chat and send photos on their behalf, the report says.”
The paper says that “The founder of the apps, Joel Simkhai, conceded both were vulnerable and he was rushing to release a patch to address the issues. He said he had originally been waiting until new architecture was built ‘within weeks’ but was now releasing an update … ‘over the next few days’.”
The hacker apparently put up a website (which has since been taken down) that “listed users’ Grindr pseudonyms, passwords, their personal favourites (bookmarked friends) and allowed them to be impersonated, and thus have messages sent and received without their knowledge. At one point, the website also allowed users’ profile pictures to be replaced.”
Out of Touch Advocate say Salt Lake City is “Gayest” City in America
In what is must be either a bid for publicity (which the media dutifully picked up), or an attempt to create a rating system entirely divorced from reality, The Advocate has declared the “gayest” city in America to be…. Salt Lake City. Yes, this is the same Salt Lake City that’s home to the Mormon Church and routinely launches vehemently anti-Gay Republicans onto the national political scene.
Their criteria consists of a point system based on these metrics and divided by city population: # of elected LGBT city officials, WNBA teams, International Mr. Leather competition semifinalists, Imperial Court chapters, softball teams competing in the Gay World Series, LGBT bookstores, nude yoga classes, transgender protections, # of concerts by Gossip, the Cliks, and the Veronikas.
In other words, they’ve created a rating system not based on objective measures, but rather based on metrics designed to produce some wacky results. Yes, some cities makes sense: Cambridge, Denver, Austin, for example. Logical measures like Census data, a meta-survey of positive media mentions or where people are on LGBT social networking sites would have ranked places like LA, NYC, Chicago. Where’s the fun in that when you can use metrics like Imperial Court chapters and nude yoga classes?
Here’s their list of the gayest places in America:
- Salt Lake City
- Orlando
- Cambridge, MA
- Fort Lauderdale
- Seattle
- Ann Arbor, MI
- Minneapolis-St. Paul
- Knoxville, TN
- Atlanta
- Grand Rapids, MI
- Little Rock, AR
- Portland, OR
- Austin
- Long Beach, CA
- Denver
To be fair, they seem to have removed all the places that any non-convoluted analysis would rank: “It’s no secret that megalopolises New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles have robust LGBT life — and we’ve even heard tell of little queer hoods like the Castro and P-Town. This isn’t that list.” Instead, they decided to “look at the per capita queerness of some less expected locales.”
The Advocate seems to have gone through this exercise to give the media something wacky to pick-up on and report — and in doing so, raise the The Advocate’s profile. That’s not an entirely bad goal, except when their reporting cheapens The Advocate and the brand’s long history of chronicling the lives of gays and lesbians in America.
Gay Airman Says It Gets Way Better Being Out
Randy Phillips started an anonymous video blog about life as a gay solider before DADT was repealed. After the repeal, the 21-year old airman came out to his father. And he says It Gets Better.
Oh, and check out his work out video:
Simon Doonan: It Gets Better
On the heels of his latest book, Gay Men Don’t Get Fat, Simon Doonan has released his It Gets Better video. The former Barneys creative director’s husband, shelter superstar Jonathan Adler, released his own video last week.
Simon Doonan Says Gay Men Don’t Get Fat
Simon Doonan, former Barney’s creative director (and spouse of the very talented Jonathan Adler), has a new book out in which has says Gay Men Don’t Get Fat. He tells the New York Times: ”Gay chips are baked. Straight chips are deep-fried. It’s that simple.”
The premise of the book? The Times says is “that the vast range of the world’s culinary options can be boiled down to two core categories: gay food and straight food. Seeking out a balanced diet of both is the savviest way to stay svelte. Think of it, if you must, as bisexual eating.”
Some quick tips? Guacamole, Mexican food and English food are straight. Sushi and macarons are gay. Oh, and “organic olive oil, thick porridge, heaping helpings of wheat germ” are lesbian.
Find the book on Amazon.com. Read the New York Times interview with Doonan.
Bullfighting Gays Up
Spanish matador Joselito Ortega is going to “Gay Up” his cape. That is, he’s printing it on his cape to advertise a gay-targeted soft drink called Gay Up. And the AP says this is pretty radical:
In Spain, matadors are viewed as the ultimate masculine figure. With Ortega endorsing merchandise that is targeting gay men, he definitely has people talking. “I am a bullfighter. That is not going to change. I am going to go out into the ring as I have done until now, to risk my life, and the seven gorging wounds on my body prove it,” Ortega said. “If the gay community welcomes me as an image or symbol, that is fine.”
Now if someone could kindly explain how a soft drink can be “gay.”
