The hidden truth I'm ready to face at last... I'm gay: Stanley Baxter, 94, bravely tells all about the sexuality he still wrestles with and the guilt he feels about wife who took her life.

Stanley Baxter is one of the most successful entertainers of his generation and for many years had his own Bafta-winning TV series.

He was married for 46 years, but beneath his cheerful exterior lies a man tortured by the fact he is gay.

In this remarkable new authorised biography, which Stanley originally refused to have published before his death ”” for fear of being judged ”” journalist Brian Beacom reveals the secrecy and sadness that have haunted the entertainer all his life.


Stanley Baxter (pictured) was married for 46 years, but he reveals in his new autobiography beneath his cheerful exterior lies a man tortured by the fact he is gay

The most outrageously funny man on British television 50 years ago was Stanley Baxter. His sketch shows were months in the making and the talk of the nation ”” spectacular, controversial, unlike anything ever seen.

Baxter staged full-scale MGM musicals and played every role. He could sing, dance, deliver broad panto comedy and perform pinsharp impressions of any star, male or female.

His act was so daring that he was probably the first TV comedian to impersonate the Queen. With silk gloves up to his armpits and a tiara, he announced himself as the Duchess of Brendagh and delivered a Christmas message that talked of the Queen Mum as a priceless antique.

Millions were scandalised ”” and breathless with laughter. In a television era rich with comic talent, from Morecambe and Wise to Tommy Cooper, Dick Emery to Mike Yarwood, everyone agreed Stanley Baxter was king.

What none but his closest friends realised was that Baxter was desperately unhappy, his personal life a battlefield. He lived in dread of being exposed in the press as a gay man.

His wife Moira, from whom he was separated, was tormented by mental illness and had attempted suicide by cutting her wrists in the bath. Baxter himself often spoke of wanting to die.

Today aged 94, he lives as he has for 25 years ”” a virtual recluse at his flat in Highgate Village, North London. For decades he has hated to venture out: 'I didn't want to be seen as someone who was once Stanley Baxter,' he says.

The showbiz world is rife with tales of heartbreak, loneliness, wasted talent and regrets. Of all those stories, it is hard to imagine anything more sad than this one.

He first asked me to write his biography more than 20 years ago, but was emphatic that he did not want it to appear while he was alive. Baxter would tell the whole truth, on condition that it remained a secret. Even though Moira was dead from an overdose by this time, he was sickened at the thought that his sexuality might become common knowledge.

When his friend Kenneth Williams's diaries were published posthumously in the early Nineties, he fought a legal battle to ensure nothing about his sex life was printed. By 1999, he was fearful that an unauthorised biography might be commissioned against his wishes. To pre-empt that, he agreed to let me tell his story . . . but not to publish it. 'I'm too afraid of what people will think of me,' he said. 'I got into this business to be loved. I don't wish that to stop.'


Stanley and Moira (left and right) on their honeymoon in London in 1952. They were married for 46 years

This year, he changed his mind. He's willing to let the world decide for itself. But it would be wrong to imagine he has found peace. 'There are many gay people these days who are fairly comfortable with their sexuality,' he says. 'I'm not. I never wanted to be gay. I still don't. Anyone would be insane to choose to live such a very difficult life.' He adds, his voice dark: 'The truth is, I don't really want to be me.'

Stanley Baxter was a star on the Glasgow talent circuit aged six, in 1932. Dressed in a sailor suit, his hair tonged in waves, he did impersonations of Laurel and Hardy, and Mae West.

As his mother Bessie, a blacksmith's daughter, accompanied him on the piano, the boy belted out saucy music hall numbers with titles such as I'm One Of The Lads Of Valencia: 'You can't beat a Spaniard for kissing, Oh ladies, just think what you're missing!' He loved the applause ”” 'a hundred people shouting 'Bravo' and I'm beating the adults to the prizes'. But more than that, he feared his fiercely ambitious mother. 'She probably felt if she praised me I'd try less hard. I began to be scared someone else would do better than me on stage, and my mother would clatter me.'

Since he was a toddler, Bessie had taken him to vaudeville shows. She called him her Sonny Boy and, as his precocious talent emerged, had him perform at every family gathering.

As he grew up, she was intensely jealous and would shoo away any girls who admired him: 'She started telling me about these two boys who once took a wee girl into a haunted house up the road and did terrible things to her. And they were birched! Beaten with sticks.'

His family remained in Glasgow during the Blitz at first, a teenage Stanley and his mother sheltering under a dining table during the bombing. Later, they decamped to an island outside the city.

In 1944, his call-up papers arrived. Too short-sighted for active Army service, he was afraid of being assigned to the merchant navy and the Atlantic convoys, but instead he was ordered to report to the coal pits, as a 'Bevin Boy' ”” one of the conscripted mine workers.

By then, he had fallen in love for the first time. He says now that he'd known for years that he found men more attractive than women, because at the Saturday morning cinema club he could not take his eyes off the half-naked Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan, rather than Maureen O'Sullivan's Jane.

But he did not understand what he was feeling till he met Bill Henry, a schoolmate with blond hair and a taste for intellectual books. Bill had girlfriends, but he spent almost all his spare time at the Baxter house, sitting in Stanley's bedroom and talking till the small hours about art and philosophy, 'until we fell asleep, exhausted'.


Stanley Baxter as the Pantomime Dame in "Jack and the Beanstalk" at the King's Theatre, Glasgow. January 1977: Talented Stanley could sing, dance, deliver broad panto comedy and perform pinsharp impressions of any star, male or female

'I was in love with Bill,' Stanley says, 'but he certainly wasn't in love with me. He probably knew the way I felt about him. Although we'd spend lots of time in each other's beds, nothing happened.'

Until, inevitably, it did. 'It was like a 3,000 volt electric current going through me. In that moment, I thought the world had changed. Afterwards, I gasped, 'Have you done this before?' And he said dismissively, 'Oh yes, I've had all my friends'.'

For Bill this was just sexual experimentation, and he would later reject a sexual relationship with Stanley, preferring women. He died aged just 26 and Stanley was heartbroken.

After the war in Europe was over, in June 1945, a 19-year-old Baxter was told to report to the Seaforth Highlanders regiment. He was sent to India, and then further East to Burma, where he was promoted to corporal and assigned duties as a typist (Class 3). There, he saw a notice appealing for performers to join the Combined Services Entertainment unit [CSE]. 'If you can sing, dance, play a musical instrument or whatever,' the announcement read, 'please apply'.

Auditions were in Singapore and, after arriving there in December 1946 by flying boat, he was taken under the wing of a stooped, grey-haired man with a dusty moustache and a strident, nasal voice.

It was the future Carry On star Kenneth Williams, also barely out of his teens but playing an old man in a CSE production. He took an immediate shine to Baxter.

'He just liked the look of me, I guess,' Baxter says, 'which wasn't always the way with Kenny and people. We became close, without it ever being more than friendship.'

It was in CSE that Baxter met openly gay men for the first time. Instead of gaining the confidence to join them, he shied away, repelled by the high camp ”” 'all chiffon hankies and make-up and flouncing about. I thought, I really hate this. I don't want to be involved in this kind of world'.

Baxter resolved to repress his sexuality when he returned to Glasgow two years later ”” to live, as he put it, 'as a straight actor'.

He joined the Citizen's Theatre Company in the Gorbals, an idealistic group performing Ibsen and Shaw to working-class audiences. And he met Moira Robertson, a 22-year-old who had worked her way up from the wardrobe department to the stage.

Chic, with hooded eyes, Moira could have been Bette Davis's younger sister. 'I liked her,' Baxter says. 'I admired how fashionable she looked. She was far more bohemian than me.' They became lovers. 'It was partly a feeling of, 'I'll show them,' he admits. 'I could be as heterosexual as the rest of them.'

She was in love with him ”” and Baxter believed he was falling in love with her. He told Kenneth Williams as much. 'Silly boy,' the actor noted pithily in his diary.

On December 23, 1950, Williams made another note in his diary: 'Stanley wrote to say he is going to marry Moira.'

Beset with doubts, he confessed to Moira that all his previous affairs had been with men. Her reaction was dramatic. Rushing to the window of their second storey flat, she climbed out onto the ledge and shouted, 'If I can't have you then I won't settle for anyone else.'

To pacify her, Baxter promised they would marry, if she would consent to wait a year. 'It was real weakness on my part,' he says now. 'She guessed wrongly what being with a gay man entailed.'

What it did entail was years of loneliness, beginning on their honeymoon night. Overwhelmed by the knowledge that he was making a mistake that would ruin both their lives, Baxter sat on the wedding bed and sobbed.

He soon gave up any pretence of being faithful, or heterosexual. 'I couldn't put up with very long periods of not being with men,' he says frankly. 'Thankfully Moira was very understanding. If there were someone I were interested in, I could bring them home. And she was very good about letting them go to bed with me. She would go off to our bedroom and let me take the one opposite.'

They moved to London and Moira gave up the theatre, to be a housewife. Her husband's career blossomed, with a series of cinema roles that led to star billing in films such as The Fast Lady.

But fame made his clandestine life even more risky. In January 1962, he visited the public toilets in Madras Place, Holloway, hoping to pick up a man for casual sex. Instead, he was arrested.

The decriminalisation of gay sex between consenting adults was still five years away. Baxter was charged with soliciting for sex. 'I was going to top myself,' he says. 'I thought, 'My career will never survive this. And if I don't have a career, what do I have?' ' Friends suddenly shunned him, fearful of guilt by association.

His agent advised him to engage the celebrity barrister David Jacobs, who had recently won a libel case for Liberace when a newspaper implied the flamboyant entertainer was gay. Jacobs convinced the court that Baxter could not have been 'soliciting' when he was arrested because, apart from two policemen, there was no one else in the lavatories.

The charges were dropped, on condition that Baxter promised not to sue the police for wrongful arrest.

But even today he finds it difficult to discuss the case, referring to it as 'le scandale'. He was left with a terror of being held up to public shame.

At the same time, Moira's mental health deteriorated. She was desperate for a baby, something Baxter refused to contemplate. 'I didn't want to bring any child into the world who suffered what I suffered. A wee'un would surely have grown up with problems and taken drugs.'

He left for a theatre tour of Australia in a Brian Rix farce, leaving his wife behind. 'Anybody else would have gotten rid of me but she was devoted. Fixated,' he says.


Stanley Baxter as panto dame May 1985: Baxter was desperately unhappy, his personal life a battlefield as he constantly lived in dread of being exposed in the press as a gay man

When he returned, he decided to seek medical treatment for his sexual urges. Therapy proved useless: his psychiatrist, learning that he was married, advised him simply to return to his wife.

Instead, Baxter told Moira he could no longer live with her. In 1970, with The Stanley Baxter Show a huge BBC hit, he moved out of their house and took the apartment in Highgate Village that would be his refuge for the rest of his life. He relished the opportunity to live in pristine order, with a housekeeper to keep the place spotless.

He met Moira daily for lunch. She talked of killing herself, but he was shocked when a friend called round to find the front door wide open ”” and Moira in the bath, the water crimson with blood. She recovered in hospital and wrote to her husband, insisting, 'I'll never do something so foolish again.' But there was no chance of a reconciliation.

After switching to ITV with the promise of a colossal budget for The Stanley Baxter Picture Show, he met a 28-year-old German accountant named Marcus. Baxter was 46, and thought their two-day fling would be no more than a brief encounter.

'Marcus took me completely by surprise. Something was happening between us but I didn't wish to acknowledge the fact. He kept phoning all the time, telling me there was something special between us. I didn't want to know, but gradually I was falling in love.'

Moira's behaviour became more alarming. She visited the LWT studios while her husband's show was recording, and danced in the lobby when she was not allowed onto the stage. She danced too in the gardens in Highgate Village, naked.

'She told me she was hearing voices,' Baxter says. 'She would think the television was talking to her.' A psychiatrist diagnosed schizophrenia, but she refused to take medication.

There were few people he could tell of his worries. Certainly not Kenneth Williams: 'I remember sitting with him in an Italian restaurant, and telling him that I was very low. I explained a great part of the problem was Moira. I told him of how she was slipping into little overdoses, and I would be going round to see her and reviving her. 'And suddenly Kenny cut in, 'Yes! Yes! You're not much fun any more. A bit boring! Very boring!' '

Marcus was a constant support. But Baxter's anxieties were channelled into his work, and his perfectionist instincts became overwhelming. Stanley Baxter specials became vanishingly rare: one at Christmas 1976, the next at Easter 1979. Exasperated, his ITV television bosses told him they could no longer afford his extravaganzas.

He returned to the BBC but, after a one-off in 1986 in which he played 37 roles (including Mae West, whom he first impersonated aged six), that contract also ended. He went on to star in a children's series called Mr Majeika, about a schoolteacher who is actually a wizard.

But rejection and the stress of his double life had chewed away his confidence. Baxter began to turn work down ”” not playing Captain Hook in a production of Peter Pan opposite Lulu, not appearing with Cannon and Ball at the Palladium. 'I turned down too many parts . . . almost as often as a chambermaid turns down bed sheets.'

A dreadful fantasy played in his head, that he would suffer a heart attack backstage during panto season and be found dead on the floor of the dressing room.

Instead, he withdrew from the showbiz world. His relationship with Marcus deepened and continued until the younger man died of lung cancer four years ago, though the two never lived together.

He saw Moira frequently, but the fractured marriage was always difficult. In 1997, he decided to spend a month at the villa they owned in Cyprus. She wanted to come, too. Feeling she was too ill to travel, Baxter told her she must stay in London. He took her passport, to prevent her from trying to follow him.

'It was then she physically attacked me. She punched me and my glasses flew off. It was the one and only time she had ever reacted in this way. But immediately afterwards she was so sorry.'

Later that week, Marcus visited her ”” they got on well ”” and found her nursing a dying pigeon by the fire. It had been run over in the street. 'One wounded bird helping to look after another,' Stanley said.

When he called her from the airport, on his return to the UK several weeks later, she didn't answer. Anxious, he took a taxi to the house. The front door was open. Moira was dead on her bed from an overdose. She was 69 years old.

He had always felt guilty for marrying her. He felt guilty for the many affairs and the new partners. He felt guilty when he moved out, unable to share a home with her any longer.

And now he felt incredibly guilty because at the very end, he wasn't there ”” to do what? Say sorry? Say goodbye? Or just give her the only thing she had ever asked for ”” to be with him.

The Real Stanley Baxter by Brian Beacom is published by Luath Press Ltd, £17.60 hard-cover or £10.09 Kindle Edition...
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1910022055

Well it was kinda inevitable given the numbers... a month-long lockdown from Thursday, Boris Johnson has announced.

Until 2 December, people in England will only be allowed to leave their homes for specific reasons, such as education, work or food shopping.

Straight young men on the app are posting suggestive videos with their buddies. It’s not just about the views.


Foster Van Lear, a 16-year-old TikTok personality from Atlanta, has posted videos of himself kissing guy friends on the cheek. “Everyone is fluid and so men have become less hesitant about physical stuff,” he said.

Connor Robinson, a 17-year-old British TikTok star with rosy cheeks and a budding six-pack, has built a large following by keeping his fans thirsty. Between the daily drip of shirtless dance routines and skits about his floppy hair, Mr. Robinson posts sexually suggestive curve balls that, he said, “break some barriers.”

In an eight-second video set to a lewd hip-hop track by the Weeknd, he and a fellow teenage boy, Elijah Finney, who calls himself Elijah Elliot, filmed themselves in a London hotel room, grinding against each other as if they’re about to engage in a passionate make-out session. The video ends with Mr. Robinson pushed against the tiled wall.

But as racy as the video is, fans are under no pretense that the two are in the throes of gay puppy love. Mr. Robinson and Mr. Finney identify as heterosexual, but as some TikTok influencers have discovered, man-on-man action is a surefire way to generate traffic. Uploaded in February, the video has gotten more than 2.2 million views and 31,000 comments (lots of fire and heart emojis).

“Normally, I do jokey dance videos and stuff like that, but it seems like things have kind of changed now,” Mr. Robinson said from his bedroom in Cumbria, England, which is painted forest green to stand out on TikTok. He estimates that 90 percent of his nearly one million followers are female. “Girls are attracted to two attractive guy TikTokers with massive followings showing a sexual side with each other,” he said.


Connor Robinson, left, a British TikTok star, posted this racy video with Elijah Elliot on his feed in February.

Gay and bi-curious male followers are welcome, too. “If watching my videos makes you happy and stuff, that’s cool,” he added.

As devotees of TikTok’s young male stars know, Mr. Robinson’s hotel seduction video is veering toward becoming a modern-day cliché. The youth-oriented social media platform is rife with videos showing ostensibly heterosexual young men spooning in cuddle-puddle formation, cruising each other on the street while walking with their girlfriends, sharing a bed, going in for a kiss, admiring each other’s chiseled physiques and engaging in countless other homoerotic situations served up for humor and, ultimately, views.

Feigning gay as a form of clickbait is not limited to small-fry TikTok creators trying to grow their audience. Just look at the hard-partying Sway Boys, who made national headlines this summer for throwing raucous get-togethers at their 7,800-square-foot Bel Air estate in violation of Los Angeles’s coronavirus guidelines.

Scrolling through the TikTok feeds of the group’s physically buff members can feel as if you’re witnessing what would happen if the boys of Tiger Beat spent an uninhibited summer in Fire Island Pines. There is a barrage of sweaty half-naked workouts, penis jokes, playful kisses and lollipop sharing.


The TikTok star Josh Richards, 18, left, has posted several videos with his so-called boyfriends.

Josh Richards, 18, one of the group’s breakout stars, has posted videos of himself dropping his towel in front of his “boyfriends” Jaden Hossler and Bryce Hall; pretending to lock lips with another buddy, Anthony Reeves; and giving his roommate, Griffin Johnson, a peck on the forehead for the amusement of his 22 million followers.

It certainly hasn’t hurt his brand. In May, Mr. Richards announced he was leaving the Sway Boys and joining one of TikTok’s rival apps, Triller, as its chief strategy officer. He also hosts two new popular podcasts ”” “The Rundown” with Noah Beck and “BFFs” with Dave Portnoy, the founder of Barstool Sports ”” and is the first recording artist signed to TalentX Records, a label formed by Warner Records and TalentX Entertainment, a social media agency.

“These boys feel like a sign of the times,” said Mel Ottenberg, the creative director of Interview magazine, which featured some of the Sway Boys in their underwear for its September issue. “There doesn’t seem to be any fear about, ”˜If I’m too close to my friend in this picture, are people going to think I am gay?’ They’re too hot and young to be bothered with any of that.”

Fun to Be ”˜Gay’

As recently as a decade ago, an intimate touch between two young men might have spelled social suicide. But for Gen Z, who grew up in a time when same-sex marriage was never illegal, being called “gay” is not the insult it once was.

Young men on TikTok feel free to push the envelope of homosocial behavior “because they’ve emerged in an era of declining cultural homophobia, even if they don’t recognize it as such,” said Eric Anderson, a professor of masculinity studies at the University of Winchester in England.

By embracing a “softer” side of manliness, they are rebelling against what Mr. Anderson called “the anti-gay, anti-feminine model attributed to the youth cultures of previous generations.”

Mark McCormack, a sociologist at the University of Roehampton in London who studies the sexual behavior of young men, thinks that declining homophobia is only one aspect. He believes that many of these TikTok influencers are not having fun at the expense of queer identity. Rather, they are parodying the notion that “someone would even be uncomfortable with them toying with the idea of being gay at all.”

In other words, pretending to be gay is a form of adolescent rebellion and nonconformity, a way for these young straight men to broadcast how their generation is different from their parents’, or even millennials before them.



Foster Van Lear, a 16-year-old high school student from Atlanta with 500,000 followers, said videos showing him kissing a guy on the cheek or confessing feelings for his “bro” make him look cool and dialled-in.

“In the new generation everyone is fluid and so men have become less hesitant about physical stuff or showing emotions,” he said. “It would seem ridiculous if you were not OK with it.”

As a matter of fact, his father has called his videos “really weird” and “gay.” His mother was also taken aback by his public displays of affection with male friends, but now appreciates the pressure that high school boys are under to stand out.

“If you are just straight-up straight now, it’s not very interesting to these kids,” said his mother, Virginia Van Lear, 50, a general contractor. “If you are straight, you want to throw something out there that makes people go, ”˜But, he is, right?’ It’s more individual and captures your attention.”


Mr. Van Lear said that his videos make him look cool. “If you are just straight-up straight now, it’s not very interesting to these kids,” his mother, Virginia Van Lear, said.

Parents are not the only ones perplexed; these videos confound some older gay men, too.

Ms. Van Lear said that one of her gay male friends came across a TikTok video in which her son joked about a man crush and told her: “You know, if Foster ever wants to talk to me if he’s gay ”¦” She had a good laugh. “People of my generation don’t get these boys are straight,” she said. “It’s a whole new world out there.”

Meet the ”˜Homiesexuals’

But there’s no confusion among the mostly teenage fans who can’t seem to get enough of these gay-for-views videos.

Whenever Mr. Robinson posts videos of himself getting physical with another male friend, he is deluged with feverish comments like “Am I the only one who thought that was hot”; “I dropped my phone”; “OMG, like I can’t stop watching.”

Ercan Boyraz, the head of influencer management at Yoke Network, a social media marketing agency in London, said that the vast majority of the commenters are female. And rather than feeling threatened or confused by guys who are being playful with other guys, they find it sexy.

“Straight guys have always been attracted to girls being flirtatious with each other,” said Mr. Boyraz, who has worked with Mr. Robinson. “Girls are just taking the same idea and switching it around.”

Call it equal opportunity objectification.

@aaronsee_

 

@clayboywheels

 

Many gay people in China face disapproval from their families ”“ and the communist state. But one social networking app has finessed the difficult dance with authorities by focusing on business, not activism.

Like many gay Chinese growing up at the turn of the millennium, Duan Shuai began his long, deliberate process of coming out online. After school, he would visit the newly opened internet cafe in his hometown, Xinzhou, a small city in Shanxi Province bounded by a veil of mountains. He would pick a desktop facing away from the wall so that nobody could look over his shoulder. Then he’d go to QQ, the new instant-messaging service and online forum, and type in the Chinese word for “homosexual” ”“ tongzhi, or comrade.

Offline, Duan had known for a long time that he was different ”“ and he knew no one else like him. Even in primary school, while his male classmates talked about girls, he nursed a secret crush on a boy, a gregarious, basketball-playing class monitor. Online, he stumbled into a world where he finally felt he belonged, a place where gay people like himself sought kinship and connection.



When he was 17, he watched Lan Yu, a 2001 Chinese film about a love affair between a male college student from northern China and a businessman in Beijing, based on a novel published online by an author known only as Beijing Comrade. Duan was moved by one scene in particular, in which the businessman brings his lover home for the Chinese New Year to share a customary hotpot meal with his family. He caught a glimpse into a future he never knew existed ”“ a future that was perhaps within his reach, too.

A diligent student, Duan aced his gaokao ”“ China’s national entrance exam ”“ and moved from his secluded hometown to the city of Tianjin, studying literature at a top university. To familiarise himself with China’s burgeoning gay culture, he listened to talks by the gender-studies scholar Li Yinhe on the popular television channel Hunan TV; read Crystal Boys, a novel about gay youth in Taipei by the Taiwanese writer Bai Xianyong; and frequented online chat rooms for gay men like Boy Air, BF99, Don’t Cry My Friends and the local Tianjin Cool, where he met his first boyfriend, a graduate student five years his senior.

As Duan came of age, so did the Chinese internet. In 2000, when he was still in primary school, there were about 23 million Chinese internet users; today that number has swelled to more than 900 million, and a vast majority of them are using mobile devices. Whereas Duan once sought out gay communities in small groups and quiet bars, today, as a 33-year-old working in publishing in Beijing, he can join gay meet-ups on WeChat; follow blogs and coming-out stories on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform; and, perhaps most crucial, he can connect and find partners on Blued, a gay social networking app.

When Duan opens up the app anywhere in the country, be it in Beijing’s bustling commercial district Sanlitun or back in Xinzhou, he’ll find an endless scroll of users: cosmopolitan yuppies dressed in drag, rural blue-collar workers with faceless profiles. The company’s slogan, “He’s Right Next Door,” embodies its ethos: to bring together gay men from all segments of Chinese society into one digital ecosystem.

China is home to an LGBTQ population larger than all of France, about 70 million people (based on the assumption that about 5 per cent of any given population identifies as queer). But according to a United Nations estimate, less than 5 per cent of gay Chinese choose to come out. Blued (pronounced “blue-duh” or “blue-dee”) has a reported in-country user base of some 24 million, suggesting many Chinese have opted for some middle ground.

Blued is in a peculiar position: it might be the biggest app of its kind, yet it is also the most precarious. It is a tech company in a society that has been transformed by free-market reforms, but also a gay tech company operating under a one-party government with an ambiguous stance toward LGBTQ issues that has been tightening its grip in recent years.

Internationally, China has publicly vocalised its support for gay rights at the United Nations, stating that it opposes all forms of “discrimination, violence and intolerance based on sexual orientation”. But domestically, gay marriage and adoption by same-sex couples are not allowed, and there are no known openly gay public figures in the government or explicit forms of legal protection against LGBTQ discrimination in the workplace.

On one hand, the rise of the Chinese internet, facilitated by the last three decades of market
reforms, has allowed for unprecedented connection and visibility for gay communities in China. But since 2016, as part of a cultural crackdown on “vulgar, immoral and unhealthy content” ”“ which includes everything from hip-hop music to tattoos ”“ China’s regulators have banned portrayals of “abnormal sexual relations” in television, including same-sex relationships.

Popular Chinese shows with gay storylines were removed from screening sites. Following one of these bans, Blued scrubbed homosexuality-related words like “gay” and “tongzhi” from its Chinese website, changing the official company description to The World’s Leading Interest-Based Social Health Education Network. (The company declined to comment for this article, which draws on interviews with several investors and former employees and published sources.)

No LGBTQ group has performed this dance with the authorities as successfully and carefully as Blued, a for-profit entity. By staying within the commercial and public-health sectors and framing the fight for gay recognition in terms of business, the company, under the leadership of its founder and CEO, Geng Le, has cultivated a minority community free of political activism.

Blued and its related services operate under the aegis of Blue City, which is also the name of its two-storey headquarters in central Beijing. Inside, it looks like “any other tech start-up”, says Sifan Lu, Geng’s former personal assistant, “but just slightly gayer”. At the entrance, on a wall next to a table of glass bottles of sand imported from Geng’s hometown, the Chinese words: “Qinhuangdao’s sea and sand, that is the home of Danlan.”

Danlan was the bare-bones, browser-based website that Geng created nearly two decades ago. Back then, Geng went by his birth name, Ma Baoli, and he began his career as a police officer in Qinhuangdao, a small seaside city in China’s northern Hebei Province. In 2000, under the pseudonym Geng Le and with the help of a coding book he bought called The Oriental King of Web-Making, he created a website for gay men to connect, exchange personal stories and share information on everything from safe sex to gay literature, naming it Danlan: “light blue”, after the colour of the water off the Qinhuangdao coast. Like the sea ”“ faraway, yet full of possibility ”“ Danlan would be a sanctuary for gay men to express their hopes and fears.

Long-standing Confucian traditions and values ”“ an emphasis on having a respectable marriage, giving birth to sons, saving face and filial piety ”“ remain deeply embedded in the fabric of Chinese society. This dynamic also means that family is the place where rejection and discrimination occur most frequently, particularly among the older generation. These paradoxes are clearly visible in the figure of Jin Xing, the nationally beloved talk-show host sometimes called China’s Oprah: she is a transgender woman, and the reluctant face of trans China, but she also often espouses conservative gender norms, like the importance of a woman’s domestic role in childbearing and good housekeeping.

China’s one-child policy further increased pressure on some gay Chinese to stay in the closet and enter heterosexual relationships, because parents pinned all their hopes on one child to provide genetic, legally recognised grandchildren to continue the family line. This emphasis on upholding traditional family and marital institutions has driven many Chinese to participate in xinghun: “co-operative marriages”, often between a gay man and a lesbian, to keep up the appearance of heterosexual life. The internet has facilitated these arrangements, with websites like ChinaGayLes.com claiming to have arranged hundreds of thousands of marriages over the past decade.

By 2008, the number of internet users in China had grown a hundredfold since Geng founded Danlan. To meet rapidly growing demand, he recruited five other team members, running the website out of a rented apartment and working through the night. Eventually, he expanded to Beijing, keeping up this double life. In 2012 Geng received a call from his police bureau, demanding he return to his post. His bosses gave him an ultimatum: shut down the website or quit his job and leave. He handed in his resignation that day, along with the uniform he’d worn since he was 16. He was disgraced ”“ spurned by his colleagues, disapproved of by his parents ”“ and his marriage dissolved. But he had finally come out.

Private enterprises in China must navigate government officialdom without being directly confrontational, operating by a set of rules that are as opaque as they are capriciously applied. Crucial to Blued’s success was its ability to align its agenda with the interests of authority. When Geng arrived in Beijing, he saw that government interventions were failing in China’s growing HIV epidemic. (An estimated 780,000 Chinese would contract HIV by the end of 2011, with homosexual transmission accounting for almost a fifth of infections.) Geng contacted the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention to offer Danlan’s services in public-health outreach, securing the company’s first government partnership in 2009.

Today, Blued runs HIV-testing offices with the CDC in Beijing and an online databank that connects users with other testing centres nationwide. This alliance with the government gave the company legitimacy in the eyes of the public and prospective investors. In November 2012, the CDC invited Danlan to take part in a conference on World AIDS Day led by a high-ranking official, Li Keqiang, now second in command to President Xi Jinping. “Greetings, Premier, I run a gay website,” Geng Le said to Li as he shook his hand. The handshake ”“ captured as a photograph, shared widely in the media and later hung at the entrance of Blue City headquarters ”“ changed the company’s fate. It was the party’s stamp of approval, and that seemed to lay the foundations for the company’s rapid growth.

Danlan introduced the Blued app in 2012, a few years before the government introduced a nationwide policy to boost its tech economy. The company, once kept alive by 50- to 500-yuan donations, received its first angel investment of roughly $US480,000 in 2013. It then raised a Series A round investment of $US1.6 million led by the venture-capital firm Crystal Stream and in 2014 raised an additional $US30 million from another venture-capital firm, DCM. Bloomberg News has cited insiders’ predictions that should the company go public, which in 2019 it was reported to be considering, it could be valued at as much as $US1 billion.

Proving gay China’s worth in the marketplace first, the argument goes, will shift public perception and pave the way for greater acceptance and freedoms. But according to Wang Shuaishuai, a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam researching digital gay-dating communities in China, this strategy might prove limited. Although social networking apps like Blued have allowed communities to form, they are closed, not public forums where Chinese people can build movements for their political rights.

“The problem with being gay in China is that as long as you keep your sexual orientation private, you are fine,” Wang says. “But you cannot receive public respect and recognition.” If there were an LGBTQ website whose major purpose was to discuss LGBTQ activism, it would be gone within a week, according to Dan Zhou, an openly gay Chinese lawyer who specialises in gay rights. “Every day, somebody could shut down your website without prior notice,” Zhou says.

Duan Shuai came out to his parents two years ago, at 30. It was Chinese New Year, and his mother was asking, once again, when he would bring a wife home. When he told her the truth, she cried, asking him to leave and never come back. “For many Chinese, coming out is long and drawn out,” Duan says. “Most people don’t just stride out of the closet like in American movies and announce that they are gay in this sudden, dramatic way. They’ll often agonise over it for years, gather a lot of information and place it by their parents’ bedside table, hoping that one day they’ll begin to understand.”

Last May, in the bustling centre of Beijing, Duan was standing by the keg station, wearing a rainbow-printed T-shirt, at the “Gaymazing Race”, a party co-hosted by the Beijing LGBT Centre and the local craft-beer brewery Great Leap Brewing. “Right now, we’re going through a bit of a winter,” Duan explained to me. New laws governing NGOs have limited the ability for LGBTQ groups to register and raise funds.

But Duan and essentially everyone I have spoken to involved in China’s LGBTQ life ”“ straight and gay, closeted and out, NGO volunteers and venture capitalists ”“ seem to echo the same sentiment, that the freeze will pass. In contrast to other minority groups, the LGBTQ community poses no explicit threat to party rule and is too low-priority to be on the government’s radar. After all, China’s gay population cuts across all sectors of society ”“ from Shanxi to Shanghai, from the political margins to within the party itself.

In December, in response to a groundswell of suggestions for the updated draft of China’s civil code, China’s legislature publicly acknowledged that when the government solicited public opinions last fall, it received a wave of requests for the legalisation of same-sex marriage. While same-sex marriage in China remains a distant reality, this was a clear indication that the government was acknowledging the status of an increasingly visible community. “Blued and other LGBT social media have connected the community in ways not possible before, laying the groundwork for a broad social movement,” says Darius Longarino, a fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Centre. But, he added, to push for greater change, they need a critical mass of Chinese to come to their side.

In January, Duan went home to celebrate Chinese New Year in Shanxi. Like hundreds of thousands of young Chinese who travelled back for the holidays, he was cooped up at home since, waiting out the coronavirus. A lot has changed since he came out to his mother two years ago. She’s not totally comfortable with his sexuality, he says, but can now talk openly with him about his work at the LGBT Centre and even his new boyfriend.

Duan told me that young people ask him, in his work at the centre, whether they should come out. He warns them that the challenges they face will be immense, but he remains optimistic about the internet’s power to change minds. “I was accepted,” he tells them, “more quickly than I could’ve imagined.

Edited version of a story first published in The New York Times Magazine.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/o...vil-unions

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/eur...story.html

Michael Gunning, the first openly Black gay man to swim for Team Jamaica, has opened up about the horrific bullying he endured as a child.

The Olympic hopeful, who is one of only a handful of Black swimmers at the sport’s elite level, talked to BBC Sport about the discrimination he faced in school.

“I know lots of kids get bullied at school, and I was one of them,” he said. “I wasn’t really sure at the time if it was my race, or whether it was just because I was different.

“One of the hardest things was when I was in science and a group of boys just started throwing acid at me.”

Gunning said the incident was extremely “embarrassing”, but it wasn’t the only time he was singled out for his identity.

When training before school, he said, people would consistently ask him: “Don’t Black people sink?”

These experiences drove him to work towards breaking stereotypes of Black swimmers and athletes in general, something that is an ongoing mission for him.

“It was really hurtful and made me question myself, but I guess even then I loved breaking stereotypes ”” and showing off my medals was nice too.”

He says Jamaica response has been ’99 per cent positive’.

He said he feels lucky to have only experienced a “little” discrimination on his way to the top.

He came out as gay after being cast on The Bi Life in 2018, by which time he had already switched sporting allegiances from Britain to Jamaica, his father’s homeland.

Gunning admitted he was “nervous” due to Jamaica’s reputation of anti-LGBT+ hostility, but said that other than a few negative comments, the reaction has been “99 per cent positive”.

Discussing next year’s Olympics, Gunning said: “It would mean everything to be a Jamaican gay swimmer competing on the biggest stage there is and being my open, honest self.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re white, Black, gay, lesbian or anything else and it’s crucial people around the world see what’s possible.”

I thought the republicans were on our side? Who would have thought that a conservative court (which should be impartial, but you know damn well that's never the case). So this right here is what we have to look forward to with 4 more years of Trump or rather that is what we may get with only 4 years of Trump. Some people think their religious values should apply to everyone...selectively.

https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2020/10/two-...verturned/

Quote:Justice Clarence Thomas issued an opinion today that repeatedly attacked the 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges ”“ which legalized marriage equality in all 50 states ”“ as unconstitutional because it “bypassed” the “democratic process” and cause people “with sincerely held religious beliefs concerning marriage” to “find it increasingly difficult to participate in society.”

Quote:“Until then, Obergefell will continue to have ”˜ruinous consequences for religious liberty.’”

Gay men have taken over the Proud Boys Twitter hashtag

By Alaa Elassar  -  Sun October 4, 2020

The Proud Boys hashtag, which members of the far-right group have been using, was trending Sunday after gay men on Twitter hijacked it and flooded the feed with photos of their loved ones and families and with memes.

The Proud Boys recently made headlines by celebrating President Trump's reply at last week's debate, when he was asked to condemn White supremacists. The President instead used his allotted time to blame what he called "antifa and the left" for violence and to tell the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by."  

But now the gay men of Twitter are making the group's hashtag known for entirely different reasons.

Matt Dechaine, one of the men who pitched in with photos of himself and his husband in efforts to overtake the hashtag, said his goal was simply to spread joy.

"Seeing the hashtag was so uplifting," Dechaine, who is from England, told CNN.

"It feels like the movement for positive change for all is gathering momentum all the time and I'm glad to be a small part of it. By coming together rooted in respect and love for each other, the world can be so much better!"

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/04/us/proud-...index.html

Found this interesting non-profit that deals with monitoring media ownership and bias. Looks like it will be an interesting project.

https://www.mediaobservatory.com/

Quote:Large broadcasting groups have recently been suspected of massive consolidation of resources, pooling resources to reduce the cost of producing stories. Unfortunately, this reduces the diversity of coverage that reaches the viewer, with multiple local channels sharing the same selection of news, pruned by actors often unbeknownst to them. The lack of diversity and accountability can be worrisome, particularly when this content is ideologically charged, as has recently been exposed by John Oliver in his show [i]Last Week Tonight[/i] (HBO). This surreal footage shows journalists all reading the same scripted text, provided by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, a large conglomerate of local sources, about ... the lack of diversity in the news.

I was 3 years old when this movie came out and I remember when my grandpa taped it and was excited to watch it, this was I believe somewhere around 1990-91, so I wasn't really old enough to get all the more adult themed things but the above image is something that can be quite scarring for a 4 or 5 year old kid.

I decided to watch the movie last night because I was bored and learned that Burt Reynolds was the voice of Charlie (main character) and how poor the storyline really is. The animation is fine and why they thought this movie could compete with The Little Mermaid is beyond me. Of course, I am a sucker and just welled up about Anne-Marie being an orphan and mistreated...of course I remind myself this is a terrible movie for kids. Heck this movie might be one of the reasons I'm screwed up in the head lol 

Did any of you see this Don Bluth film when you were a kid (or adult)?