Why the gays love Jesus
As the Holy Week celebrations get underway, our eyes are once more drawn to Rome and the holy show that is made of Easter week. I, for one, have often wondered what is it about religion that attracts gay men? Why also, are gays so drawn to the ranks of Roman Catholic Church, when it despises them in its teachings? These are complicated questions, which require more analysis than I will offer you today. However, considering the evening that’s in it, I will posit a theory.
Why is it that the gays like Jesus so much?
Because he was hung like this.
Saying goodbye to Gay Christmas
In a little under eleven hours time, the last ever curtain shall rise on the Alternative Miss Ireland competition, as 1,200 gays fill the Grand Old Lady of Dame St for the final time, in order to give the AMI a good send off.
This will be AMI XVIII – the eighteenth pageant, although it will mark the 25th anniversary of the staging of the original. (There were no pageants for most of the nineties.) The decision has been taken this year to euthanize the AMI, rather than let it drag on into a painful and prolonged death.
During the good ole days, the show used be a guaranteed sell out and the Olympia would be packed to the gills for the spectacle. However, the problem with having a competition that it is held on a annual basis is that the quality can vary hugely from year to year. Some years saw huge competition between clever, well-matched and well-rehearsed acts who fought it out bitterly for the Shamrock Crown. In other years however, the competition was less compelling and allowed more time “to go the the bar”. This variation in quality created a situation whereby people would go one year and see an amazing show and eagerly attend the following year, only to be disappointed.
Also, I think the recession played its part; with tickets at 30/42 Euro each, the AMI is not a cheap night out. The money all goes to fund HIV and AIDS charities, but still it is pricey in straitened times. So in the context of falling attendances and a show that was becoming maybe a little past its best, the organizers of AMI have decided to put the old girl to sleep this evening.
I think that it is the best thing to do. To my mind, it’s like organizing your own funeral, by inviting all of your friends around for a big party and then slipping off at the end of the night. Tonight we will celebrate the life of the AMI. We will come to terms with its death when it is no longer around.
The queen is dead. Long live the queen!
For my musings on previous year’s AMI click here.
Rainbow Week I*
*In anticipation of a series of musings upon Trinity Rainbow Week.
Rainbow Week is a campaign run by TCDSU and Q-Soc in order to raise awareness about issues affecting gay people – on a campus where as many as one in ten of the male population identify as “straight”.
Bord na Móna: Get yourself a flamer
The person who posted this unto YouTube, uploaded it with the rather ambiguous comment of “WRONG!”. I think they might be on to something.
Right, where do we begin. This, apparently, is Bord na Móna’s Christmas ad for 2011. It’s wrong on so many levels; not just because it features a rather implausible gay relationship.
Firstly, the acting is unbelievably hammy. The gestures and facial expressions are so large that they could be discerned from the other side of a bog. Secondly, do we actually believe that the son is a gay? Not a chance. Then there’s the actual implausibility of the two of them pairing up. Look at this photo for example:
Here have “David” who is rather good looking. Chiseled. Looks after himself. And “the son”; who recently came second in a Brian Cowen lookalike competition. What, did David take a fancy to him as he saw him throwing up down the front of his jumper outside of Copper Faced Jacks one night? Hmmmm. Likely.
And then there’s the scarf. The David’s-obviously-a-faggot scarf. IT’S AN AD FOR A HEATING PRODUCT. People should not be seen wearing scarves indoors when they are supposedly advertising your heating product. Frankly, that’s just embarrassing.
Then, the scenario of the spare bed is entirely implausible. There are many households in the country where boyfriends/girlfriends, be they straight or gay, stay in the spare bed when they stay over. The parents know that they are busy banging each other senseless when they are outside of the home, off at college, or living in Dublin. But once they come back home it’s separate beds. It’s the way it works. It’s just an Irish thing.
Then finally, the rather patronizing suggestion that coming out to your parents is “a measure of quality time.” Yeah, because that’s what young people up and down the country look forward to. Not grief, distress, worry, shock and all of the other inherently negative reactions that protective parents react with when their beloved tells them they’re a homosexual in an overtly hostile heteronormative world. No, it’s “quality time”. Just throw on a few briquettes there and it will be fine.
You know what, they’re right. This ad is wrong.
After 535 days without a government, Belgium presents:
Elio de Rupo
The impasse-busting new Prime Minster of Belgium. Gay, socialist and Francophone, in a country which is predominantly conservative, right-wing and Dutch speaking. In fact, he doesn’t speak the language of 11 million of his countrymen (none of whom voted for him.) This will be interesting… Possibly the most interesting thing ever to happen in Belgium. Fact.
Interestingly, he’s the first gay PM in the European Union. He isn’t the first gay PM of a European country however. That accolade goes to everyone’s favourite lesbian granny, Joanna Sigurdardottir, of Iceland.
Not a bad year for the gays in America
Summed up by three pictures:
Phyllis Siegel, 76, left, and Connie Kopelov, 84, both of New York, embrace after becoming the first same-sex couple to get married at the Manhattan City Clerk’s office. (Wouldn’t your heart just melt!)
Happy Gay Christmas
Right about now, the crowds should be taking their seats in the Grand Old Lady of Dame Street, and in a few minute’s time, the curtain will go up on the Alternative Miss Ireland 2011. This is the first year that I haven’t gone to the AMI; I’ve gone every year since starting college six years ago. I even entered an act when I was in third year. (Miss Information; a secondary school teacher specialising in Sex Ed and Singing).
Anyway, this year I didn’t buy a ticket. Partly because they were expensive and money is tight. Also I wasn’t going out on the gay scene anymore, so my peer group weren’t going either. Granted, I had mooted the idea with several friends and toyed with the idea of going, but the consensus this year was that uptake was smaller than other years and it didn’t seem to have any of the momentum that it had had previously, so these efforts came to nothing. A group of us went last year, and whereas it was an enjoyable evening, it didn’t have the wow factor of previous shows and it worked out to be a very expensive night out.
This year, for the first time since I’ve started attending, it didn’t sell out. Tickets are still available, and on that basis I decided to rally at the eleventh hour and get a cheap seat in the gods. Granted a cheap seat is still 30 euro, which isn’t cheap. This evening at 6pm, I managed to convince my housemate to abandon her plans for the evening in order to go, but that fell through and so it was finally decided that I would not be going to this year’s AMI. Maybe the break will do me good, maybe the hordes will be back for Gay Christmas with renewed vigour next March. Or perhaps, I will wake up tomorrow with the feeling that I’ve missed something special. However, there’s absolutely no point in fretting about it, so in the meantime let us celebrate Gay Christmas with this wonderful video of the Muppets doing Bohemian Rhapsody. (It’s a HD version, so go on, sit back, and put it on Full Screen. Treat yourself!)
Anyway, all that remains to be said is may the best queen win. The Queen is dead! Long live the queen!
Listen up!
I spent the week before Christmas working in a large Dublin department store, and as the week went on there were more and more moments when I ended up thinking “I really am working in Grace Brothers”. That of course lead me on to this, so I bring you Mr. Humphries and this rather amazing exercise in British innuendo. Listen carefully, it’s all about what’s nearly being said.
And here is the obituary that appeared in the GCN in April of 2007, written by Stephen Meyler. I remember reading it at the time and being struck by how powerful it was, and I have returned to it a few times since. Therefore, in honour of Mr. Humphries, I think I should publish it here on the Legion.
John Inman, the actor who played the camp Mr Humphrys in the ‘70s BBC sitcom Are You Being Served? died last month, aged 71. He is survived by his partner of 33 years, who he ‘civil-unioned’ with in 2005. The show was one of the most popular the BBC ever had, running for seven seasons, with 22 million viewers at its peak. It was broadcast repeatedly around the world for years after the run, with the result that Mr Humphrys became one of the most visible gay characters of the era, despite former Grace Brothers’ colleague Wendy Richard claiming he just really loved his mother. His catchphrase, “I’m free!”, entered popular culture’s vocabulary and Inman parlayed Mr Humphrys’ success into decades of panto damehood, although later attempts with similar TV characters failed.
An old debate about whether such screamers are good or bad representations of (and for) the gay community was reawakened after Inman’s death. The arguments on either side seem to be age-related. For older gays, who were teenagers or young adults when the show first aired, there is a general warmth for Mr Humphrys. Yes, he was a mincing queen, always ready with an innuendo-laden quip and a flutter of the eyelids. But, the pro Humphrys camp points out, he was a respected member of the staff at Grace Brothers who got and gave as much slagging as anyone else, and he remained a central player in what was the most popular soap at that time. Within the fiction, his effete gay character was completely acceptable, unlike the reality outside the TV that most ‘70s gays were living. The character was unapologetically camp, revelling in it in fact. Despite the stereotype, the pro lobby regard him as an important step in the normalising of gay people.
Not so, counter the younger anti-Humphrys crew. They grew up in an era when gays were far more visible in the media, and gay issues were regularly aired and discussed there, and in their schools. For them, Mr Humphrys is a homophobic caricature of a bygone darker age, who at best, made queers ‘safe’ for an unchallenged mainstream culture to have a good old chuckle at, and at worst, served the purpose of dehumanising gays to make it easier to deny them respect and rights. He reinforced hatred and should be consigned to oblivion.
There’s an ‘internal’ aspect to these arguments about representation. It’s about how ‘gay’ characters, behaviours, statistics, etc. make gay people feel. A big poof being saucy about a pussy to his long-time colleagues once a week for seven years might provoke a young queer to think about what his sexuality is going to mean when he reveals it; it might show him the possibility of acceptance. On the other hand, it might drive him so far back into the closet that he’s touching wood; making the old queen Mr Humphrys your inner gay is probably not to everyone’s taste or ability. Of course, there’s also the small issue that most gay people would not be sexually attracted to Mr Humphrys.
Modern queers are naturally exasperated at being represented by such a crass caricature – they want the straight world to see us and accept us in all of our diversity, and Mr Humphrys is a big sparkly roadblock to that progress.
However, there’s an impression that this exasperation is also about having a problem with effeminate gay men. The antipathy towards Mr Humphrys assumes a very different aspect then; internally, it’s about gay men unable to accept that some of us are actually big screamers or that all gay men have something of the ‘feminine’ about them, no matter how many contact sports we play. It’s natural probably, after all our sexuality is about attraction to ‘masculine’ attributes such as large shoulder muscles or disguising emotion. What no one should forget, though, is that being straight-acting is as much a performance as Mr Humphrys’ ever was.
Stephen Meyler, April 2007.
Gaying it up a bit
You must be wondering how on earth this blog could possibly get gayer. Well it has. Embrace it.
What not to say in Berlin!
Last week I was in Berlin and I couldn’t get this tune of of my head. It’s from The Producers by Mel Brooks.
N.B. I’ve just noticed that the singing stormtrooper is none other than John Barrowman. In one way, it’s very funny; in another it shows up just how sinister the homoerotic nature of the SS was. (As if that was the only sinister thing about the SS…)
Splitters!
It has been a source of much heartbreak for me that the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival has gone down the self-destructive road of a split. It means that this May there will be two rival theatre festivals, both with astonishingly similar names – the Absolut Dublin Gay Theatre Festival and the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival – both competing for the same audience and both being nasty and bitchy to one another.
I never thought I’d be getting dressing tips from Sue Sylvestor.
Gerry Claffey, this one is especially for you.
Visit Britain
Two old poofs have been turned away from a B&B in Berkshire, on the basis that they were two old poofs. (I know, people having sex at that age! Perish the thought!) Apparently the B&B owner was a Christian and the idea of having Sodom and Gemorrah in her upstairs bedroom was just too much to stomach.
A Legion of Marys 