Q-Seattle Events: Tacky Tourist Clubs

The eagle-eyed among our readers -- if there are any -- might have noticed a line at the bottom of the admittedly rare recent posts here, "Post mirrored from seaQwa.com".

"Huh?" you might reasonably have said.

Well, here's what's been happening: This blog -- and only the blog -- is moving to a new home at a new website called seaQwa.com. There's more to the overall site and I encourage you to check it out, but the blog part of it is at seaqwa.com/blogs/Qblog, which is the new home for what you've read here for the past couple of years.

[If you read this post in a feed-reader (and if you don't know what that is, then don't worry about this) please subscribe to this feed of the blog's new home. If you'd also like to get regular updates on news items of LGBTQ insterest, subscribe to this news feed. If you prefer to get updates by email, you'll find a subscription form on all seaQwa pages that have a feed.]

The seaQwa site is still in what I'm calling "preview" mode -- meaning that there's still a bunch of work that has to be completed on the thing. The pages are occasionally inexcusably slow. For that, I apologize. I'm working on a solution.

But you can, nonetheless, see much of what it will become from its current state. In addition to the continuation of this blog in a new setting, the site includes many of the things that I (or, to maintain this blog's persona) that we, your webwrangler, have been doing for the past couple of years on those Squidoo.com pages listed just under the promo box to the right of this column. A big part of what I've been doing there is the news digest. That frequently-updated digest will continue on Squidoo, but it now has its new homebase on the home page of seaQwa.com and, in blog format, on Qnews.

On the home page, you'll also find a "Qticker" of recent blog post headlines from a myriad of bloggers.

I thank everyone who has stopped by here at blog.ttca.org over the years we've been on these green pages and I hope you'll come visit us at our new, blue, and Q-filled home. Oh, and please don't be as shy as you've been on these pages. Add a comment to anything that strikes your fancy (anonymous is OK). You could even add your own posts to the Qyou blog.

What does that mean for this site?

Everything else about this site is staying right here at ttca.org, where it's been for over twelve years now. (And that, is a long, long time in web years.)

Your webwrangler will continue to update this site at his accustomed leisurely pace. Sunny Bruce will continue to greet you on these pages (have you ever noticed that he says something a bit different up in the rose-colored bar on almost every page?) and he will still bring you the latest Cruise alerts in the summer on the mailing list. We might even browse through our extensive galleries and throw up a picture every now and then to this blog.

Please drop by for a visit. Oh, and tell your friends. Thanks.

Labels: blog-on-blog, gay news, Gay Seattle, link bites, Seattle, state:WA

As we prepare this blog for our now-delayed move to a new home, we've been trying to to add more voices to the blog. We hope to have even more exciting news about that in the next week or so, but we introduce one of those occasional voices today in the following post.

Roger Winters has agreed to write occasional essays for us in our new home, but we offer a hint of what's to come with a post by Roger here on our longtime location by reprinting a response he posted to one of those irritatingly predictable rants by opponents of marrige equality.

In a post on his blog, Richard Land -- a syndicated radio host and head of the government affairs arm of the Southern Baptist Convention -- expressed his alarm the decision of an Iowa judge that (briefly) lifted the ban in that heartland state on same-sex marriages:

Forbidding same-sex couples from marrying may be a constriction of their liberty, but more importantly, it is an expansion of the people?s liberty to define what constitutes marriage.

Roger was inspired to offer Land a lesson in the meaning of legal marriage in comments to the post. We reprint Roger's response.

Roger is President Emeritus of the Legal Marriage Alliance of Washington (LMAW), having served as volunteer president of that group from 2001-2006. He was also a co-founder of LMA in 1995. He has been an activist in the LGBT movement in Seattle since the 1970s.

Labels: blog-on-blog

Your WebWrangler apologizes for being AWOL for longer than expected from these virtual pages. I visited family in Montana in early September and found my plans to keep up with things here more difficult than expected. But the real problem came from a scenic shortcut I tried to take during a stroll in beautiful Butte. (OK... well--)

It was a short little fence. Surely, I thought at the time, I could just step over the thing. Not really such a bad plan except that I didn't account for wider-than-necessary pants legs that got caught in a post and sent me tumbling. When I finally agreed to go to an emergency room, the ER doc told me, "I've never seen a knee disturbed in quite that way."

For the past week back in Seattle, I've been dealing with clinic-referral hell and have also been forced to learn that crutches aren't exactly an efficient means of locomotion. Sigh...

So anyway, I've fallen far behind on the usual slow rate of posts here and on other things related to the site. I'm slowly getting back up to my usual feeble speed, but Bill W. over at gayseattle.blogspot.com has been doing a great job of keeping up with local gay-related events. Check it out.

Labels: blog-on-blog

Each day, we peruse various sources of news bits about queer folk to find interesting stories. We post headlines and summaries (for now) over on a service that depends on the flaky interaction between two flaky services, Squidoo (which allows users to build a pre-formatted page on any topic that strikes the fancy) and Blinklist. (That's one of many "social bookmark" sites. Most do what they do better than that one, but we use it -- despite its frequent bugs -- because it provides the best tools we've found for the unique way we use it).

[This blog will move along with those news digests to a new news site in about, oh... late September. There's nothing there just yet.]

As we scan the headlines, we occasionally come across a "Well, Duh!" story that's presented as something else entirely. One of those cropped up today from the LA Daily News sports section. News staff writer Greg Hernandez ledes [but we'll add the links]:

When David Beckham finally started in a game for the Galaxy on Wednesday night, the event didn't just make the front pages of mainstream newspapers and sports Web sites. It also warranted the posting of a shirtless photo of the soccer star on Kenneth Walsh's gay-themed blog.

Mr. Hernandez then recounts a good-natured investigation why this might happen. Money quote from Outsports.com CEO Jim Buzinski:

"When it comes to visuals in sports, gay men and straight men are very similar except for the genders that we look at," Buzinski said. "Men are more visual. So we are just doing what mainstream sites do but we are catering to our audiences."

And, of course -- since sports writers must often write "Well, duh!" stories and become masters of the art, Hernandez recognizes the "well, duh!" moment for what it is by summarizing: "Men are men".

Another of those stories cropped up over the weekend when we came across a Reuter's headline, "Merv Griffin died a closeted homosexual". The news service had picked up the story from Hollywood Reporter writer Ray Richmond, who once worked for Griffin. When we first ran across it, we muttered, "Well, duh!", but decided not to post it in our digest.

The story would probably have made a few ripples in the blogosphere as it did when -- along a few others -- local blogger "Rad Ass Homo" scolded the industry mag, "I say shame shame to the Hollywood Reporter -- they should know better or at least have some respect...This could of ran a week later or something..."

Richmond's story had been scooped by a meatier posting about Griffin's closet on the blog of outing-meister Michelangelo Signorile, who offers reasons why Griffin's choice to remain in the closet was not just a personal matter. Among the examples:

Griffin's closet had him firing gay men who'd actually made it up through the ranks of his own company, simply because they were openly gay. There is a story in Queer in America about a man identified as "The Mogul" who did just that. I can now reveal that The Mogul is Merv Griffin. Open homosexuality is a threat to the closeted, and powerful people in the closet like Merv Griffin will often do whatever it takes to squash those who are open and who might advocate that all among the powerful should come out.

But Richmond's story turned from "Well, duh!" to "Taa Daa!" later in the day when Reuters dropped it from its entertainment feed. Even the original source, Hollywood Reporter, briefly dropped the story from its site on Saturday. And all of that saying-and-not-saying in the age of the web, along with reactions to it, was enough for Signorile blogger Kevin Allman (who's been all over the background story) to give the affair a name: "MervGate." *

We had another "Well, duh?" moment this morning when we saw something in BoingBoing about the gay papa of departing "Bush brain" Karl Rove. Since the 2006 book, The Architect had identified Rove's step-father as gay, this is a "more to the story" take on the "Well, duh?" theme. According to a BMEzine [NSFW] editor quoted by BoingBoing essayist Xeni Jardin, "Karl Rove's father was not only gay, but a part of the early body piercing scene and a regular at 70s piercing parties... There are pictures of him on BME."

Adding new details is always a good reason to resurrect an old story. [Just like quoting a story about gay blogs posting beefcake of straight athletes is an adequate reason to, well... post beefcake of straight athletes.]

* [Update:] Allman link to "MervGate" added after he added a helpful comment. Thanks.

Labels: blog-on-blog, celebrities, link bites, shirtless hunk

The New York Fire Department (which, of course, is known as "FDNY" rather than the other initials which could be pronounced as a not-encouraging word) has cancelled a fundraising effort that last year raised over $150,000 for the department.

It's all the fault of "a series of gay blogs" according to news reports. Those blogs were atwitter last week when a non-profit foundation released its annual calendar featuring FDNY firefighters posing shirtless, but innocently for the cameras.

The calendar itself wasn't the problem. Instead, what "embarrassed" department officials was an unrelated video that made the rounds on the blogs showing the chosen cover boy for this year's calendar in a more far more revealing, but still quite innocent interaction with the all-female crew making the first "Guys Gone Wild" DVD.

The New York Post has fun with its description of the clip:

The embarrassing video of 22-year-old firefighter Michael Biserta of Brooklyn's Ladder Co. 131 and his enormous member is featured in the 2004 Joe Francis-produced DVD "Guys Gone Wild."

The video clip began to circulate when Biserta appeared on the 2008 calendar that went on sale Tuesday.

In the clip, the female camera operators goad Biserta to show them his fire pole.

When they ask him to dance for them or get up on the bed, he refuses, but does agree to get in the hotel room's shower in the nude.

Biserta also, we should point out, reluctantly agrees to show that his "fire pole" will fit all the way around his wrist as a kind of bracelet after a good-natured, feeble protest that "you girls are a bad influence on me."

"This -- this," says an only slightly embarrassed Biserta in the clip, "is the craziest thing I've ever done."

We think it's even a stretch to call the video "salacious" as the New York Daily News does in its story.

The FDNY was caught off-guard by the DVD, which came to light after the latest firefighter calendar was printed and the shirtless firemen appeared on NBC's "Today" show.

Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta responded to the salacious developments by prohibiting city firefighters from ever posing for the charity calendar, which is published by the FDNY Fire Foundation.

But please, judge for yourself. The site and the page aren't anywhere close to safe-for-work, but it's only fair to direct you to PornForPatric's post about the calendar that includes (if you wait long enough for the inevitable server delay) the video clip in question. Fleshbot also linked, but apparently lost access their version of the video clip. They do, however, offer several stills. Andy Towle linked to those posts an others on his widely read news blog, Towleroad.

That was all, apparently, a bit too much for FDNY officials, but we don't understand how exactly any of this should be embarrassing to the department.

In fact, at least one of his fellow firefighters seems to be similarly non-offended, according to the Daily News

One of Biserta's fellow Bravest at the Lorraine Ave. firehouse was amused by his colleague's lewd past.

"Nice," the firefighter said, flashing a thumbs-up.

Labels: blog-on-blog, link bites, shirtless hunk

Seattlest reports that John McCain's official page on MySpace (of all places) briefly offered a surprising message to browsers Tuesday morning: "Today, I announced that I have reversed my position and come out in full support of gay marriage ... particularly marriage between passionate females."

But, no... It wasn't a real change of heart from the straight folk on the "Straight Talk Express."

Seattlest explains:

A McCain staffer swiped a template page from Seattle-based news-sharing site Newsvine and when Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson figured out that the template was directing a lot of traffic to an image hosted by Newsvine he swapped it with his own message of tolerance. Instead of a generic list of links McCain's site began displaying an announcement of his support for gay marriage.

This (borrowed, but not hot-linked from Newsvine) is what the upper left corner offered to visitors until McCain staffers replaced the pilfered code with the current muddled mess:

Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson insisted that the prank wasn't meant to be political.

Before McCain fans comment on this, let me reiterate that this was a prank. I'm not politically inclined, I'm not anti-McCain, and I'd have a beer with the guy anytime. Election season on Newsvine is sure going to be fun though.

It was, instead, intended as a lesson in internet etiquette: Never link to an image on someone else's server without explicit permission. (I.e. use linking prophylactics.)

Since McCain staffers had violated that cardinal rule, changing their message was barely even hacking.

So, the only thing necessary to effectively commandeer McCain's page with my own messaging was to simply replace my own sample image on my server with a newly created sample on my server. No server but my own was touched and no laws were broken. The immaculate hack.

Be careful out there, especially when you're in nasty neighborhoods like MySpace.

Labels: blog-on-blog, link bites, politics

In a story posted for the week's issue Bay Windows, one of Boston's gay newspapers, summarizes the challenge of blogs and new media to the old line activist group, Human Rights Campaign (HRC). Some bloggers haven't been giving the group the kind of deference it has grown accustomed to from paper-based activist media.

The back and forth between HRC and the blogs shows just how difficult it is for an organization to control its public image in the 24/7-instant-communication world of the Internet.... In the not-so-recent past, HRC could control its public image through emails to its members and stories in the LGBT press that would always carry HRC?s point of view.

The gay commentary blogs have criticized HRC for being too closely tied with the Democratic Party, for their membership claims, and, now, for their spending.

On a daily basis, bloggers from across the political spectrum -- conservatives like Andrew Sullivan, progressives like Pam Spaulding and Michael Petrelis and libertarian-leaning bloggers like those at the Malcontent -- have used the platform of their blogs to whack the organization on everything ranging from the organization?s perceived alignment with the Democratic Party and its slowness to acknowledge the work of gay-friendly Republicans to its aggressive fundraising and merchandising campaigns within the community to its alleged ineffectiveness.

In the past, local gay papers, including Seattle Gay News, generally printed press releases from HRC unedited, often including its oft-repeated tag line "America's largest civil rights organization working to achieve gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender equality." Most blogs do the same, but a handful have begun to question the group's policy, strategies, and even its membership figures. Sullivan doubts the accuracy the membership figures on which they base that tag line.

The Boston paper doesn't attempt to trace the genesis of the blog critiques of HRC, but the critical attitude seems to have started with the one gay paper that has often dared to question HRC and other LGBT activist group, the Washington Blade. Today, in fact, the Blade posted a news story revealing that HRC spent $26.4 million for a new headquarters building and also paid out nearly $160,000 last year to a former executive directory who left HRC after the disastrous 2004 elections.

The Blade's former editor, Chris Crane, set a style of questioning HRC policies while he was at the paper. Since leaving the Blade last year, he's continued to question the group with frequent posts on his superb commentary blog Citizen Crane. The other blogs seemed to follow Crane in his skeptical view of the group.

Bay Windows offers this summary

Crain ... traces the recent discontent with HRC to a January Boston Globe article on HRC?s work in the 2006 elections. The piece noted HRC's work to help elect Democratic majorities both in Congress and at the state level in New Hampshire and elsewhere. The article claimed that HRC leaders wanted the organization to be seen as a "steady source of grassroots support for Democrats -- more akin to a labor union than a single-issue activist group."

In the article HRC President Joe Solmonese said that after the 2004 elections HRC shifted its priorities away from opposing state marriage amendments and towards electing candidates. For Crain, the article showed that HRC had put the interests of the Democratic Party ahead of the LGBT community.

"For a lot of people that expressed what had been suspected for a long time.... It plays out with whether they view the Democratic Party's priorities as their own.... I have yet to hear the kind of response I had hoped to hear, which is, 'No, that is not the case, and let me show you how we have stood up to the Democratic Party nationally and locally, and let me alleviate your concerns,'" said Crain.

Although the Blade's parent company, Window Media, still prints its many papers for standard distribution, the company and its conglomerate of local gay papers have largely transformed themselves into new media with significant and frequently-updated web content. (Witness, for example, our own Gay News page on Squidoo that often links to Blade stories.) The Blade is now a part of the new media world which gives its critical stories quicker and wider distribution.

HRC, which has been only slightly more effective than local Seattle groups at harnessing the power of new channels of communication, has found new media slightly more skeptical even among its friends. But this is a skepticism that is bound to make the overall goals that HRC claims to still seek more achievable.

Activist group like HRC could get away with claiming to speak authoritatively for all LGBTQ people. Blogs are making it apparent the the many agendas (as the right calls them) of those group are far more diverse than HRC liked to pretend.

Note: Regulary updated feeds from bloggers mentioned here and others are available on our Queer Commentary Squidoo page.

Labels: activism, blog-on-blog, gay organization

Even if seattle.metblogs isn't on your list of regular local sources (and it should be), you might want to check out their oh-so-brave decision to build a votable list of favorite local blogs. Most of ours are on this Squidoo page. What are yours? Tell metblogs about them.

Labels: blog-on-blog, Seattle

You've just gotta love the way that t-shirt drapes on Mika's slender (and what some folks have called "chiseled") bod. And no, he's not standing next to a bear in the upper pic. That's a poorly doctored picture of him next to a fan, but not just any fan, it's uber-gossipist Perez Hilton. We figured Perez wouldn't mind the doctored photo.

In our prior posts, we failed to link to Mika's own MySpace page. (We're usually scared that those things will be unreadable globs of buggy picture viewers and other junk, but his is OK.)

Over in the UK, where's he's all that, the Guardian asks (but can't quite answer) why he's the only "camp" and/or "flambouyant" or "sexually ambiguous" or __ (fill in the blank with non-Isaiah adjectives) pop singer out there. (Is he really?)

And the Sun pressed him on the question that still pops up often in our search strings:

He refuses to say whether he is gay or straight, claiming his sexuality is of no consequence to his career.

He said: "I never talk about anything to do with my sexuality.

"I just don't think I need to. People ask me all the time. But I just don't see the point.

"In order to survive I've kind of shut up different parts of my life, and that's one of them, especially this early in my career."

Lifelong has some great pics by Matthew Browning up on their blog from this month's Superhero Gay Bingo event. The photog has a few more hotter pics on his interesting blog.

And congrats to Lifelong for recognizing what this whole blog thing is all about and for somehow managing to create something on MySpace that's actually readable even if it isn't very linkable. From the evidence of others on that service, it isn't easy to do that on MySpace.)

If you don't yet have tickets for upcoming bingo nights, you should act fast (or meet someone who does have the tickets). Both February's Pirate Gay Bingo and March's Groovy '70s Gay Bingo are now sold out and tickets are already half sold for April 14's Art Appreciation Gay Bingo. If you're still a Bingo Virgin, come see what everyone is talking about and get your tickets for the remainder of the 2007 season now!

Those Q-lens links under the Cruise box on our web site (which we copy to this post so that they'll also show up in the RSS feed) are our way of sharing some of our favorite links and blogs. The Gay news lens and the Gay Seattle lens both now feature news digests at the top. Even though the pages from that service are slow to load, once they do load, each of those (and the others) give you a quick way to keep up with 'mo stuff flowing through the 'net tubes.

The first Revival apparently worked out well at Element. It will return with more "dancing, queers, and $1 beers" on Feb. 4. Models Benjamin Bradley [sfw profile of his porn career] of Falcon and Ethan Reynolds, founder of Bratboy will be featured.

Labels: blog-on-blog, Gay events, gay party, link bites, Mika