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The NCAA statement about future and scheduled sites comes after Houston voters this month repealed an ordinance that banned discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.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

New Marsha P Johnson biopic praised as ‘real Stonewall story’

A new trailer for the film has been compared to Roland Emmerich’s recent version of the riots.
A trailer has been released for a new biopic focusing on trans activist Marsha P Johnson.
Starring trans actress and Oscar hopeful Mya Taylor in the lead role, the short film charts the lead up to the Stonewall rising and has been praised for its depiction of trans women of colour, leading many to compare it to recent flop Stonewall. 

The Roland Emmerich film is based on the 1969 Stonewall riots, which are often considered the birthplace of the gay rights movement. Prior to release, the film came under fire amid claims of whitewashing and trans-erasure, after the first trailer suggested it would be centred on a white middle-class gay hero. Though Emmerich and the film’s star Jeremy Irvine both defended it, it has been panned by critics and audiences alike. Read more via PinkNews

US: 'The Danish Girl,' about a transgender pioneer

“The Danish Girl,” Tom Hooper’s new film, is a story of individual struggle that is also a portrait of a marriage. In this respect and others it resembles “The King’s Speech,” Mr. Hooper’s earlier historical drama, a multiple Oscar winner a few years ago. In that case, the union of George VI and Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, was the foundation on which the tale of George’s elocutionary striving was built. Here, the marriage is bohemian rather than aristocratic, but the stakes, while personal, are every bit as profound and consequential as the matters of state that drove the monarch to the microphone.

When we first encounter Gerda and Einar Wegener, played by Alicia Vikander and Eddie Redmayne, they seem perfectly matched. Both are painters, living amid the soft colors and sea air of Copenhagen in 1926. Gerda is a portraitist, while Einar’s landscapes — drawn from his childhood memories of the fjords and marshlands of Vejle, a town on the Jutland peninsula — have brought him a measure of fame. Like many couples who share a profession, they provide each other with support as well as a bit of competition. Their best friend, Ulla (Amber Heard), a dancer, marvels at their mutual devotion, which combines the easy, egalitarian warmth of friendship with the heat of sexual attraction.  Read more via NYTimes

US: Academy to consider trans actresses in their proper gender category

If you missed Tangerine when it first appeared over the summer, now’s a good time to catch up: The film—director Sean Baker’s sensitive, honest, and often funny look at the lives of a pair of transgender prostitutes over the course of a particularly eventful L.A. Christmas Eve—is sure to be the subject of much discussion this Oscar campaign season. With the support of producers Mark and Jay Duplass and distributor Magnolia Pictures, Tangerine’s trans stars are being advanced as candidates for the best actress and best supporting actress awards. This is a big deal—according to Variety, “It’s the first time a movie distributor has ever backed an awards season push for a transgender actress in Hollywood history.”

That the Duplass brothers and Magnolia are throwing their weight behind a nomination is itself an encouraging—and welcome, considering the performances in question—development. Kitana Kiki Rodriguez (up for the best actress category) and Mya Taylor (best supporting actress) are both new to feature filmmaking, and yet their acting in Tangerine (in front of an iPhone 5s, no less) is deeply compelling, organically modulating from girlfriend comedy to stark portrait of life on the margins with style and verve. But more important, while cis-playing-trans performances have been nominated for the Academy Award before, this push marks the first time actual trans actresses will be seriously considered. Read more via Slate

Gay rugby documentary “Scrum”

MARK Bingham, a rugby fanatic and openly gay man, was on United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001 when terrorists hijacked the plane. Mark, along with other passengers, managed to crash tackle the terrorists in an effort to regain control of the plane. Despite their efforts, the flight went down in the fields of Pennsylvania. No one survived.

In Mark’s memory, the Bingham Cup, an international gay rugby world cup was founded. Not only did the Sydney Convicts host the cup in 2014, they are defending champions. But since moving up a grade in their competition, the Convicts A team has been beaten fair and square in just about every match. Nobody likes to lose, least of all the Convicts. Read more via Star Observer

Australia: This Is What Happens At A Formal For LGBT Teens

Traditionally, school formal night itself pales in comparison to the weeks of anticipation.

Thoughts of table configurations, outfits, fake IDs, and, of course, dates cloud the collective psyche of the average graduating class. But for kids who are gay, bisexual, and transgender, such everyday worries easily magnify as they wonder where they fit in this particularly “straight” mainstay of the high school experience. Consider the transgender girl who has long dreamed of the opportunity to wear a ball gown, but fears ridicule by her peers. Or the out guy who wants to bring his boyfriend from another school, but is met by a hostile administration. For this girl, this guy, and many, many others, the formal can be a minefield of awkward situations and social exclusion.

Enter Minus18. A group for LGBTI young people based in Victoria, Minus18 has run several successful formals for queer young people and their friends in Melbourne over recent years. The group has tapped into a market with clear demand – numbers at their last Melbourne formal swelled to about 500. Read more via Buzzfeed

In Its Honesty and Beauty, Carol Is a Revolutionary Piece of Filmmaking

When Patricia Highsmith’s novel about a love affair between a suburban socialite and a younger shopgirl was published in 1952, it was revolutionary in its depiction of healthy, overt female desire and for its hopeful ending. (Spoiler alert: Neither of the women ended up relegated to a mental institution or in a loveless marriage with a man she loathed or dead.) While lurid lesbian pulp with gruesome endings proliferated at the time, Highsmith’s The Price of Salt (also titled Carol and written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan) elevated love between women to the realm of the possible, offering a kind of representation, surely, that very few queer women of the time would have previously known.  Read more via the Advocate

Is your fav vacation spot Paradise or Persecution for LGBT people?

Can you tell heaven from hell? It's not all palm trees and blue seas for local LGBT people. Take the quiz yourself and help improve the lives of LGBT people. 

The quality of the local nightlife, museums and beaches matters more to people thinking of a holiday abroad than whether their hotel waiter is likely to be sentenced to death or imprisoned for being gay.
That’s a finding from an opinion poll by an international HIV charity ahead of the launch of an online quiz, ‘Paradise or Persecution’ , which aims to raise awareness of the more than 75 countries in the world that criminalise people on the grounds of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

But a HIV charity thinks people would probably think twice about holidaying in a country that criminalises Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender (LGBT) communities, if they knew the scale of the problem.  More

Ireland: Hozier calls Pope Francis' LGBT position 'lip service' that 'should have been said 100 years ago'

On the back of Hozier's runaway hit "Take Me to Church," the Irish-born singer-songwriter has become one of music's most outspoken critics of institutionalized homophobia. In an interview Monday with Larry King Now guest host Kelly Osbourne, Hozier took the Catholic Church and Russia to task on their practices of discrimination against the LGBTQ community. 

Speaking about the Catholic Church and Pope Francis' popularity, he said, "This is one of the paradoxes and weird hypocrisy of that organization [Catholic Church]. The pope came here last year and said, 'Who am I to judge with regards to somebody's sexual orientation?' I think it is important to differentiate between lip service towards something and actually making change. I think it is hopeful, but saying this in 2015, 'Who am I to judge?' is something that should have been said 100 years ago." Read more