- Sexual Obituaries 2011 (Cory Silverberg) – People who choose to work around sexuality and gender often don’t get the acknowledgment from the mainstream media or from society as a whole that they would if their work was in another field. Every year, I feel this absence when I read the lists of famous people who died. Since 2006, I’ve tried to change that by sharing some of the sex and gender activists, educators, artists, and outlaws we lost in the year that is ending. Here is a list of sexual losses in 2011.
- Director Dee Rees And Star Adepero Oduye Talk Coming Out & Coming Of Age In ‘Pariah’ | indieWIRE – Pariah is the story of Alike (Oduye), a black lesbian teenager living in Fort Greene and navigating between the aggressive gay nightclub scene preferred by her butch best friend Laura (Pernell Walker) and a closeted life at home, where her tightly wound mother Audrey (Kim Wayans) tries to dress her in pink cardigans and quizzes her about who she’s taking to the school dance.
- Bondage Sex And The Liberation Of Culture – ErosBlog: The Sex Blog – For anybody with an interest in cultural history — and especially, aspects of cultural history that have ever been covert or officially suppressed, like porn — it’s this “everything floats up to the surface and becomes visible, in time” aspect of the Internet that is most miraculous. It’s far from complete, mind you — we have many centuries of recorded culture that have yet to be digitized and brought up from their buried layers of stone and canvas and paper and cellulose and vinyl and magnetic tape.
- 2011 Top Ten Sex Questions (Cory Silverberg) – I don’t dig into my statistics all that often, but once a year I like to see which questions and answers were the most popular…These ten questions are from the 105 Sex Questions that I’ve answered on the About.com site.
- Navigating Love and Autism – NYTimes.com- Only since the mid-1990s have a group of socially impaired young people with otherwise normal intelligence and language development been recognized as the neurological cousins of nonverbal autistic children. Because they have a hard time grasping what another is feeling — a trait sometimes described as “mindblindness” — many assumed that those with such autism spectrum disorders were incapable of, or indifferent to, intimate relationships. Parents and teachers have focused instead on helping them with school, friendship and, more recently, the workplace.Yet as they reach adulthood, the overarching quest of many in this first generation to be identified with Asperger syndrome is the same as many of their nonautistic peers: to find someone to love who will love them back. [via Violet Blue]
- When Will a Gay Pro Athlete Finally Come Out? — New York Magazine – “Something has happened in the last year,” says Jim Buzinski, co-founder of OutSports, an advocate for and chronicler of gay sports issues for more than a decade. “It’s almost like homophobia is no longer considered cool in sports.”
- Australian Passport Gender Options: ‘Transgender’ Will Be Included | HuffPo – Australian passports will now have three gender options – male, female and indeterminate – under new guidelines to remove discrimination against transgender people, the government said Thursday.
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- The Downfall of Alexa Di Carlo | Charlie Glickman – But I do take exception when someone creates false credentials in order to dupe the gullible. I worked hard to get a doctorate in sex education and many of my colleagues, whether they have academic credentials or not, have dedicated years of their lives to learn about sexuality in order to provide good information. I feel a lot of anger when someone pretends to have done the work in order to make it seem as if they know what they’re talking about….It also upsets me when people misrepresent sexwork. Usually, people make it seem as if it’s much a much worse career than it might be, especially when they want to ban it. But it’s also problematic when people glorify it because it creates a misrepresentation of the challenges and difficulties that sexworkers face. In turn, this romanticizes the profession and makes it more likely that people will decide to try it out without knowing how to protect themselves.
- Law.com – ‘Cached’ Pages May Be Evidence in Child Porn Case, Panel Says | Law.com – In a case of first impression in New York, a Brooklyn appellate panel has held that temporary files automatically “cached” by an Internet browser may serve as evidence of promoting and possessing child pornography…The Appellate Division, 2nd Department, looked at similar cases from other jurisdictions and concluded that their “consistent thread” was the need to distinguish “inadvertent” acquisition and possession of child pornography from “knowing” and “intentional” acquisition and possession.
- Prostitution “Experts” Versus Prostitutes: Why Don’t All Sex Workers Deserve a Voice? | Monica Shores |Huff Po – This ugly display of disrespect is unwarranted and near inexplicable. Why would these women be so threatened by sex workers organizing for themselves, gaining national attention, and working to influence public perception? Is the abolitionist narrative or abolitionists’ prominence as experts more important than the people they’re purporting to help? The poor thinking and outright bigotry exhibited by some anti-prostitution figures can no longer go unchallenged. Sex workers of all ages and genders deserve better advocacy than this, and thankfully, as the recent VAMP example proves, their demands for more honest discussion may no longer go unheard.
- How Obscene is This! The Decency Clause Turns 20 — NCAC – In September 2010, the National Coalition Against Censorship, in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and the BFA Department of Visual & Critical Studies at the School of Visual Arts, held a series of programs to highlight the effects 1990s attacks on culture continue to have on art and society and to reassess the state of art funding, censorship and self-censorship today. The programs included panel discussions, film screenings and event-specific videos.
- PEEP SHOW Interview w/ Tristan Taormino, Part One « FilmSnobbery – Tristan’s written several books, including The Ultimate guide to Anal Sex for Women, and served as an editor for many others. She was a syndicated columnist for the Village Voice for almost ten years and currently writes an advice column for Taboo Magazine. Between her writing, her teaching, and her TV appearances, we feel lucky to have gotten her to answer our Peep Show questions.
- Trve West Coast Fuck-Up Lit: Protection | Danny Wylde – Anyone who’s been a part of the adult industry for any significant amount of time has no doubt heard countless rumors about who’s an intravenous drug user, who escorts (a polite term for an upscale hooker), who has gay sex in their private life, and who has sex with transsexual women. Some of them are baseless, but a portion always turn out to be true. Each of the above stated behaviors could be considered “high risk,” and each are practiced by performers within the straight “side” of the industry. So when going to work, every performer puts themselves at risk. It’s a part of being a sex worker. Surely, no one wants to increase that risk, but finding a scape goat is the worst possible way to address the issue.
- Invasion of Privacy Charges After Death of Tyler Clementi – NYTimes.com – The Sept. 22 death, details of which the authorities disclosed on Wednesday, was the latest by a young American that followed the online posting of hurtful material. The news came on the same day that Rutgers kicked off a two-year, campuswide project to teach the importance of civility, with special attention to the use and abuse of new technology.
- Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker – Gladwell disputes the usefulness of social media in motivating and coordinating high-risk activism. A very interesting look at the difference in utility between strong ties and weak ties. (via @sitps)
- 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
- It Gets Better. Also … Grief. Please #stayalive. – Sugarbutch Chronicles – That’s five. Five people, five boys, who could have grown up to be part of our world, part of our community, part of gay activism, or who could have, at the very least, grown up. Five boys since school started less than a month ago.
Action Alert from National Coalition for Sexual Freedom
Help make history by signing the DSM Revision Petition now! The diagnoses in the DSM-IV-TR still subject people who practice BDSM, fetishes and cross-dressing to bias, discrimination and social sanctions without any scientific basis.
We need 3,000 signatures, but we only have 2,200 now. If you don’t speak up and call on the American Psychiatric Association to adhere to empirical research when revising the diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM V), then the Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders Work Group won’t make a meaningful change.
To sign, go here.
You can make your signature anonymous on this secure petition site so it doesn’t appear on the Internet or when the petition is delivered to the APA.
Petition:
“We, the undersigned, support the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) own goal of making its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) a scientific document, based on empirical research and devoid of cultural bias. A diagnosis of a mental disorder can have a severe adverse impact on employment opportunities, child custody determinations, an individual’s well-being, and other areas of functioning. Therefore we urge the APA to remove all diagnoses that are not based upon peer-reviewed, empirical research, demonstrating distress or dysfunction, from the DSM. The APA specifically should not promote current social norms or values as a basis for clinical judgments.”
To find out more about the DSM and the Paraphilias section, read the NCSF & ITCR: The Foundation for NCSF’s “White Paper on the DSM Revision.”
For more information, email Susan Wright.
Help spread the word – please distribute this call for signatures!
