GXR GAY NEW

National gay rights groups and the state chapter of a civil rights group headed by the Rev. Al Sharpton are backing efforts to enact an anti-discrimination ordinance in Scottsdale that would cover gay and transgender individuals.

Scottsdale is considering a measure that would apply to businesses in the city, city government contractors and agencies.

The Human Rights Campaign and National Gay & Lesbian Task Force have joined local gay rights advocates, including Equality Arizona and the Arizona Transgender Alliance, in backing the measure. The state chapter of Sharpton’s National Action Network also is supporting the measure.

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MONTBELIARD, France (AFP) — French police have detained a 68-year-old retired “drag queen” performer after the murders of 18 mainly gay men over three decades, prosecutors said Wednesday.

Detained Tuesday at his home in the eastern city of Mulhouse, the man was being held in nearby Montbeliard along with a male former lover who is a suspected accomplice, the prosecutors said.

The suspect worked as a female impersonator in a string of cabarets in eastern France and over the border in Germany until he retired in 1992, according to sources close to the investigation.

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It may be the DVD release of I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. Or maybe there’s something in the air, but it’s queer-baiting season again – that is, time to figure out “Who’s Gay & Who’s Not.

The wonderful world of science continues to burrow into sexual difference. A study out of Ontario contradicts earlier evidence by saying gay and bisexual men are more likely to write with their right hand.

A new study has provided a new twist on the connection between sexual orientation and right or left-handedness, claiming that gay or bisexual men have an elevated incidence of extreme right-handedness.

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Brian Bates’ victory in Doraville City Council race called groundbreaking

Brian Bates is a 36-year-old business owner in charge of Doraville’s annual Police Appreciation Day.

He’s active in his neighborhood association and staunchly supports popular police Chief John King, who became a major issue in elections earlier this month.

So Bates’ victory in a race for city council didn’t come as a major surprise in this town of about 10,000 residents. But, it was, in fact, groundbreaking.

Bates is now the state’s first openly gay Republican elected to office – a development that has gained the attention of politicos and pundits across the country.

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Charles and Harry could be many a bickering, thoroughly co-dependent couple who’ve been together for two decades, but life wasn’t that simple for gay men in the London of the ’60s. That’s what adds some dramatic meat and bite to Charles Dyer’s “Staircase,” the otherwise schematic if waspish 1966 comedy that opened Saturday at Theatre Rhinoceros. The darker notes that creep into the last scene humanize the camp, bitchy-hairdressers couple and add depth to a fitfully funny show.

“Staircase” is of historical interest in any case. A late replacement for Mart Crowley’s unavailable “The Boys in the Band” in Artistic Director John Fisher’s 30th anniversary season, “Staircase” actually predates “Boys” (by a few months) as the first openly gay play on Broadway in the modern era. A hit in London (with Paul Scofield and Patrick Magee) in ‘66, and a flop in New York (with Eli Wallach and Milo O’Shea) in ‘67, it also bombed as a movie, starring Richard Burton and Rex Harrison, in ‘69. In every case, the publicity stressed the heterosexual credentials of everyone involved.

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Two young men kicked and beat a gay Palmerston North man to death in a drug and alcohol fuelled attack, a court was told yesterday.

Then as a final humiliation and with “unspeakable ferocity”, the pair removed part of an earlobe and the head of the victim’s penis, Crown prosecutor Ben Vanderkolk told the jury at the High Court in Palmerston North.

Ashley Arnopp, 21, and Andre Gilling, 18, have denied murdering Stanley Waipouri, 39, in his flat in Rangitikei St, Palmerston North, on the night of December 22 last year.

Mr Vanderkolk said it was unlikely events in the flat could ever be reconstructed and the question of motive for the killing was “unanswerable”.

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CHRISTIAN bookshops are refusing to stock copies of a new Bible study guide that challenges standard New Testament translations that describe gay sex as sinful.

A US distributor, God’s Word to Women, has banned the Australian publication, and withdrawn another Bible translation published by the same NSW publishing house, Smith and Stirling, for promoting a lifestyle in contradiction of the scriptures.

Two American academics have asked that their endorsements be removed from other works by a classical Greek lexicographer, Ann Nyland, because of her authorship of the gay study Bible.

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We live in a society which attempts to dictate sexual preference and gender identity through promoting the gender stereotypes and homophobic attitudes which underpin the heterosexual nuclear family, and by promoting marriage and the nuclear family as the only legitimate model for relationships. Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people suffer oppression because their lives are a challenge to the nuclear family which is an economic cornerstone of capitalism. The Socialist Alliance opposes all attempts to shoehorn people into sexual and gender conformity. We believe it is a basic democratic right that a persons’ self-definition of sexual preference and gender identity should be recognised. Heterosexism exists at almost every level in this society, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is entrenched in all of the key institutions of society – education, health, the law, the media, family, church and state.

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“All the ‘artists’ with a capital A, the parlor pinks and the soprano voiced men are banded together,” warned President Harry S. Truman in 1946. “I am afraid they are a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin.” In the 1971 Watergate tapes, Richard Nixon railed against “homosexuality, dope … immorality in general: These are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it.”

Yet during the same decades, gay cultural figures – such as composers Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein and playwright Tennessee Williams – played a pivotal role in shaping what became known as American culture. This seeming paradox has led critics such as Nadine Hubbs to ask how gay men could have contributed so much to national identity “during America’s most homophobic era.”

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