BY MATT MILLS – Scientists in China say they can turn mice gay by lowering serotonin levels in mouse brains. Straight guys at Hooters have found that chicken wings fortify hetero-normative conceptions of masculinity, while celery stalks can lead to sexy gay kissing. 
I suddenly have the urge for something healthy and crunchy.
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Got a few xtra bucks and looking for something to do in Toronto this Sunday evening? Well, it’s time for the AIDS Committee of Toronto’s (ACT) 10th annual SNAP! photographic fundraiser. It includes a live auction, silent auction and photo competition. It will be held at the National Ballet School, one of the niftiest venues in Toronto for this kind of event. ACT needs you.
This piece from the event’s online gallery caught my eye…
It’s called Mindtrap and it’s by Patrick Lightheart. It’s big too: 40 X 40. *Sigh*
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The horrifying anti-gay Ugandan bill was shelved before it reached a vote.
Check out some of Xtra’s past work on Uganda…
US evangelicals and Uganda’s anti-gay bill.
David Kato memorial in Vancouver
One man’s adventures in Uganda
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I noticed this piece from The Guardian last night about novelist, producer and movie and television star Dirk Bogarde.
Bogarde has been dead for years, but he became a huge star in the UK in the early 1940s. He was a prominent actor there as Western Europe recovered from World War II, entered the Cold War and the masses embraced television. He was a hot, creative man, and he was also a sister with an amazing moral compass.
I first laid eyes on Bogarde in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s 1996 documentary film, The Celluloid Closet. One of the films profiled in that doc is Bogarde’s 1961 film, Victim. In it Bogarde plays a handsome, successful married solicitor who becomes enmeshed in a blackmail scandal after a young male friend commits suicide. The film is about gay men living in the shadows, afraid of being outed, subject to all kinds of victimization because gay sex is criminal and taboo.
Dum-dum-daaaa! C’mon, give it a chance, it was a different time.
Victim is a complicated story in which all is not as it initially seems. It is one of earliest mass-market films that refers openly and directly to homosexuality. And it changed social mores in the UK, contributing partly to the success of the movement to decriminalize gay sex in that country and opening the way for the same here in Canada.
The DVD release of Victim includes a 1961 press interview Bogarde gave about the film and his life. It’s fascinating.
Wow, here’s the whole thing…
Sometimes I think I was born 50 years late.
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From the Toronto Star on Friday: High school clerk gets spanked for porn video.
Why you can trust Xtra
