Love me, love my iPad

OK, so I admit it, I am as a friend described me on Facebook, a "big techy apple obsessed computer nerd". Actually, not completely apple obsessed. I still haven't gone over to the dark side and gone Mac. I can't prise myself away from my PC games (see, how nerdy can I be if I play games on a PC instead of a WII? Oh wait, that IS nerdy!) and the other day was only the first time I saw all four of my beloved games; City of Heroes, Civilization IV, Rollercoaster Tycoon III and Sims 3 ALL available for Mac. (I admit, I did pee myself, just a little bit right there and then and had to stop myself asking the sales girl about a macbook pro). But then to be honest, that was a day for weeing with excitement, because you see dear reader, that was the day I bought my iPad.

Oh my god I love it. It's beautiful. Truly.
Did I need it? Of course not.
Did I want it? Desperately.

 I'd convinced myself I didn't want one. That it was a super-sized iPhone and that I had no use for it. My self-delusion lasted right through the build up and well into the hype. Until I touched it for the first time. Slid my fingertips across it's sleek, shiny screen. Playfully flicked it's apps from left to right, held it's weight in the palm of my hand and caressed it's hard covering. Mmmmmmmmmm. It felt good. It felt right.

When leaving the store after that first fateful meeting, I forcefully convinced myself that I could resist, that it was a mild flirtation with no possibility of long term commitment. The second time I drank in its sexy, sleek lines I knew there was no going back. I had to have one. I want to tell you it was because of the amazing functionality, that the iPad can do things neither my laptop nor my iPhone can do, that the apps are exceptional, the screen resolution phenomenal and if I told you these things I wouldn't be lying, they're just not the reasons why I craved it so.

Of course it's about status but it's also the fact that I travel soooooo much and need the entertainment factor. Bullshit. It's about desire. And Messrs. Ive and Jobs have done a fabulous job at building an empire based on feeding that desire.

One trip to New York, a stoking of my need by a handsome, silver tongued salesman and a saving of £80 later and the device of my dreams was sequestered in my bag where it's been ever since. When asked why I carry it with me everywhere I go, I explain "I'm like a new mother, my iPad's not yet two weeks old, I couldn't possibly leave it alone!".
But my iPad and I both know the truth: I'm addicted. Well and truly. And addiction is bliss.

Gay Icons of the 21st century

What makes an Icon? Does an Icon need to be representative of the entire collective, or is it OK for a panel of people to get together and decide for us?
This week in the Independent an interesting article surfaced, telling us gays just who our icons are.


"A panel of high-profile gay figures including Sir Elton John, Billie Jean King, Lord Ali and Sir Ian McKellen have selected 60 of their most inspirational figures, be they openly lesbian, gay, straight, bisexual, repressed or none of the above, to feature in an exhibition opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London in July..."
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/the-top-gay-icons-straight-up-1655362.html

I have mixed sentiments about the panel to start with. Elton John, is hardly representative of the mainstream Gay community. His infamous tantrums, gaudy display of wealth and self-aggrandising pontifications aside, the man recently sang for Rush Limbaugh, one of America's most obnoxious, right wing, hate filled shock-jocks, at his fourth wedding (yes he's adamant that marriage is sacred and therefore for heterosexuals only, hence him generously and repeatedly demonstrating how to get married, just in case his red-neck followers haven't figured out how to do it yet). http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/jun/08/elton-john-rush-limbaugh
Whether Elton John's fee went to the Elton John Aids Foundation or not, his choice of donor certainly is not representative of the views of the majority of Gays I know in the States, let alone here in the UK. I'd argue that his choice of Gay Icon isn't exactly representative either: Elton, wrapped up in his own little world, elected his (straight) lyricist Bernie Taupin as Gay Icon.  Seriously. Unless you're a fan, would you know who Bernie Taupin is? Thought not. Clearly Elton considers his music to be of great cultural importance to the gay community and Mr Taupin's contribution therefore must also be recognised. Sheesh!
That said, the inclusion of the likes of Joe Orton, Virginia Woolf and Bessie Smith are welcome, if only to highlight a sense of gay cultural history.


Weirdly enough, there once was a time when we were told that the Wombles were the new gay icon. 
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/sandy-nairne-they-dont-begin-and-end-with-kylie-minogue-and-judy-garland-1655363.html

Admittedly, this was back in 2000 when we were just getting over the Y2K panic (our brains must have been scrambled) and we were being informed by Jeremy Joseph a club promoter here in London and Boyz magazine, a gay rag aimed at twinks, muscle marys and other sceney types (seriously, if you get your information from ridiculous sources, your information is going to be ridiculous - Fox watchers take note). I love the irony of a group of furry, portly types being the Gay Icons of the mainstream, preened and waxed gay scene, while the Bear community's idols include muscled, ripped A-list-bears, their fur carefully tweezed and plucked to acceptable levels (overheard in a bear bar recently: "I love fur I do and I know I shouldn't care, but when it's on their backs, ugh!" and this from the hairiest man in sight). 


So, at least this new list includes real people, rather than fictitious characters, whether they are of true iconic status or otherwise. It makes for an interesting list and I'll go see the exhibition and report back...


In the mean time, feel free to comment, letting me know who your gay icons are. Tom Ford, Jonathon Ive, even Stefani Germanotta spring to mind more readily than Uncle Bulgaria (he's the leader of the Wombles, my US friends). Maybe it's time we created our own list...

Shut up I can't hear!

I hate using my phone in public. Mainly because I'm hyper sensitive to sounding like Dom Joly and looking like a general twat. I believe everyone else should be wary of this too, though if your conversation is either a) at a normal volume or b) interesting enough to ear-wig on, then fill your boots I say.
So imagine how pissed I am now:
I'm sat on the train and have just had to terminate a call because I couldn't hear the woman on the other end. Why? Because the man opposite me is shouting into his phone so loudly it's drowning out the noise of the train, the boy with the loud headphones and the crying baby (who incidentally woke up after his call started).
For god's sake man, it's a mobile phone, akin to the one at home in every sense other than it's mobility. Would you bray into your land-line causing the next door neighbour to bang on the wall and complain? No.
So get a little phone etiquette. We don't care that you've stopped smoking and your voice is going and I really don't need to know what time you're going to be arriving at your little meeting: stop bloody shouting into your phone. Its a sophisticated little device able to amplify your nasal twang enough for your caller to hear you.
It is NOT a pair of yoghurt pots and a piece of string!

On gays, community and family...

Growing up as a baby gay there was one thing drummed into me by my elder peers, 'They may never let you get married, they'll tell you you can never have kids, but you'll always have the gay community, we're your new family now'. In many ways back in 1990 this was true: The homo-hating Tories were in power (so full circle there then), the age of consent for gay men was 21 (16 for hetties), Section 28 banned the 'promotion' of homosexuality in schools forcing LGB (there was no T back then, in fact they were in the process of adding the B and it was causing much debate) support groups to disband for fear of prosecution and AIDS was still known as God's Gay Plague, 'advertised' with large forboding tombstones forewarning our impending doom. For many young gay men in the late eighties and early nineties, the gay scene really was our family. It was a community that supported, educated and looked after its own.

I remember being told which books and plays to read (Radclyffe Hall's the Well of loneliness, Plato's Symposium, Larry Kramer's Faggots amongst many others), which clubs to go to, which bars to avoid, how to say no to someone without causing offence, skills and knowledge that would ease my transition through gay adolescence and enrich my life. I remember thinking how lucky I was to have such generous 'gay parents' in Simon and Ashley... Back then, there was still a palpable sense of belonging that went with coming out onto 'the scene', that you'd finally come home, that there was a tradition and a culture that you now belonged to.

Recently I was talking with friends about their plans for Pride this year. Half way through the discussion a friend stopped and said "Isn't it funny that everyone around the world throws Pride festivals at the same time..?" I stopped in my tracks. "Err surely, you're joking right?" Except he wasn't. Gay Pride festivals are thrown as close to June 27th as possible to commemorate the beginning of the Gay Liberation movement. More specifically, this was the night of Judy Garland's funeral, the night when a group of drag queens, hippies and street kids, sick and tired of police raids on their bars, stood up and fought back after a raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York. I'd expected my friend to know this, after all he's only a year or two younger than me, it took place in his country not mine and surely his Gay Parents would have taught him... Except he hadn't had any. In fact, most gay people of my age I know, didn't. Most of them came out in their early twenties during the late nineties (I came out at 16) and by this time the Gay Train was no longer underground but about to go mainstream, as such the need for a young gay guy to be taken under the wing of an older queen and shown the ropes was well and truly a thing of the past. So what happenned to cause this shift?

It's obvious I guess. The Labour government in the UK has repealed Maggie's Hateful Acts and given almost complete equality to the LGBT community (let's not forget, while we have Civil Unions, they're not marriages - all people are equal but some are more equal than others), society at large has become more tolerant. It's no longer the norm for parents to disown their children upon learning of their sexuality (though sadly it still happens - google gay teen suicide UK for tragic results), gay couples adopt or have children of their own, are voted into positions of power - (my mate Johnnie is now Camden's mayor - OK it's not supreme power, but here's a shout out anyway! http://news.pinkpaper.com/NewsStory.aspx?id=3069 )  I'm fortunate in that I never suffered the rejection of my family upon coming out. In fact, my Mother, Father, siblings, cousins, grandparents, aunts, uncles, all have been incredibly supportive. Yet I would say that my family consists not just of these blood relatives, but of friends I have met around the world, from the early days in Nottingham, to Sydney, Chicago, New York and of course London and the UK. I have a feeling that this is the same for a lot of my peers, but I wonder whether this general acceptance by society, the acceptance of gay children and siblings by their families is eradicating the need for and the reinforcement of a gay 'community'? And sadly taking our sense of history with it? Can we as a community take our place in greater society and yet maintain our sense of self, like the black community in the US with Black History month, or do we even want/need to? My fear is that when you look at history we see tolerance and liberalism wax and wane: If we forget our history, our struggles and achievements as a community, we will be in danger of taking our current liberties for granted, and then of course we will be forever one step away from losing them.

Banning the Burqa - a question of freedom

It's very rare for me not to have an opinion on something, especially when that something involves religion and freedom of choice. So picture this, I'm sat in a restaurant in New York having dinner with three good friends, Nathan, Hal and George. I don't remember who brought it up, probably me, but I asked for their opinions regarding France banning the Burqa, as at the time I felt unsure as to what my opinion was.

For those who might not know, France has already banned all face coverings in schools as part of a law banning the ḥijāb (arabic for 'covering' - not necessarily a face covering -see pic, ḥijāb usually refers to head-scarves, although according to Islamic scholarship, ḥijāb in the Qur'an is given the wider meaning of modesty, privacy and morality; the word for a headscarf or veil used in the Qur'an is khimār) and other conspicuous religious symbols. This would include large crosses, jewish headscarves and other visible signs of faith. Personally I can't see the point in this. The whole point of education for me is to provide children with the ability to question, challenge and understand. When it comes to questions of faith what better way of having them discover other religions than to have them asking the person stood at the front of their class why they cover their hair, or why they have a star or cross hanging from their neck, for example. But I digress.

Currently on the cards in France, actually approved by the French cabinet and awaiting parliamentary approval, is a new law aimed at banning the wearing of clothes in public designed to hide the face.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/europe/10129324.stm

The measure notably creates a new offense, "inciting to hide the face," and anyone convicted of forcing a woman to wear such a veil risks a year in prison and a €15,000 ($18,555) fine, according to a copy of the text which says that "France's founding tenets of liberty, equality and fraternity, values that guarantee the "social pact" are at stake"

I'll come back to this point in a moment, but first let's look at the religious perspective.

There are a lot of articles flying around the web suggesting that the Qur'an doesn't actually say that women need to cover their bodies, so I wanted to add what I have read in the Qur'an regarding this (I have an app with the whole thing on my iPhone - I figure before you criticise something you should know it inside and out). 

Firstly the mention of ḥijāb in reference to women comes in directives on how the Prophet's followers should speak to his (the Prophet's) wives - "through a ḥijāb", Arabic for a covering or veil - this suggests that something akin to a sheet be hung separating the two groups to protect the women's modesty - it also dictates that doing so is the responsibility of the men. Qur'an 33:53 

Scholars believe that at the time there were a large crowd living in the vicinity near to where the Prophet lived, there to see and listen to the Prophet and as such this ḥijāb would allow him to maintain a sense or separateness between his followers and his wives.

Secondly, nowhere else in the Qur'an does it suggest ḥijāb in relation to women's dress, in fact it only mentions it in this way relating to the Prophet's wives explicitly. However there are several passages that refer to a woman clothing herself to protect her modesty even going so far as to specify that she cloak herself when in public and that she cover her chest and neckline specifically. Qur'an 33:59, 24:31, 

So despite no specific reference to a garment, or indeed to how far the ḥijāb should go (there is mention of the Prophet specifying hands and face are exempt from covering in the Hadith - a collection of the sayings of the Prophet, but not in the Qur'an - the writings of the Prophet himself),  it would appear that there is enough evidence to suggest that according to the Qur'an traditional head-scarves would be a requirement of practicing Muslim women, if only to cover the neckline. Of course, just like Christianity there are various ideas of what the relevant 'holy texts' mean. And anyway in France's case, the law seeks to eradicate facial coverings like the Burqa or Chadri not other forms of ḥijāb.

So as I said at the beginning, I asked around for people's opinions including my three friends at dinner.

Hal suggested that this was one step away from banning the Jewish headscarf and infringing on the liberties of other religious groups and he quoted Martin Niemöller's statement from WWII:

First, they came for the communists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up

Hal made a valid point, but my cousin when asked was able to put another popular side to the debate - when a western woman visits a Muslim country, out of respect for the customs and culture of that country she covers her shoulders, wears a long(er) skirt and in certain countries like Saudi Arabia for example, will go out in public accompanied by a man she knows. It only stands to reason that when visiting a secular country, a Muslim woman should expect to show her face... 
While this statement definitely reflects the French sentiment that wearing a Burqa goes against French values, it's hard to see how expressing your faith by concealing your face damages the tenets upon which French society was constructed. Indeed banning the right for a woman to wear what she chooses would seem to do greater damage to the tenets of liberty and equality to say the least. 


The most important argument for me surrounds the oppression of women and the role the state plays in protecting its citizens. While at Selfridge's I worked with an amazing young woman Sameera. 

She was from a very liberal Muslim family and had chosen to wear the ḥijāb as an expression of her own personal faith. Neither her Mother or sister did and her Father had frowned upon the idea initially. I had many conversations with Sameera about Islam, her faith, my sexuality, my being raised Catholic and she was confident, self assured, articulate and more than able to demonstrate her personal beliefs as exactly that, her own. I am sure that were she in Paris she would have been with the demonstrating Muslim women last week (above right). One woman was quoted in the press as saying she had covered her face with a veil for 10 years and that because she is divorced and raising her children alone no one "can say this is imposed on me."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100519/ap_on_re_eu/eu_france_forbidding_the_veil
I guess my argument boils down to this: What we're really talking about is a fear of 'them'. Them being different to us. This is clear when people feel comfortable saying, 'I don't trust them because I can't see their face', they're frightened that what lies beneath the Burqa is different to what lies beneath their own skin.We can't admit this however, and so we talk about women's rights instead. 
I agree that some Muslim women may well be coerced into wearing the veil, but should we deny other women the right to chose that for themselves, just to make us feel that little bit safer about what lies beneath the veil? If greater integration and participation in society is our aim for the Muslims among us, is it going to be achieved by ostracising them and making a martyr of their faith? Surely education, inclusion and tolerance are the way forward?


Johan Hari wrote an as usual, enlightened article last week looking at among other things the effect of demonstrating values of tolerance, freedom and justice in the independent last week, "To give one example of many, Majid Nawaz was in prison for being part of a hardcore Islamist plot to try to topple the governments of Egypt and Pakistan and seize its nukes – but when Amnesty International campaigned to protect him from torture, he realised the "Infidel" were rescuing him, because we have strong moral principles of our own. Now he is one of the most articulate campaigning enemies of Islamism".
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-islamists-their-victims-and-hypocrisy-1977424.html
Surely demonstrating these principles would be a far more effective way of encouraging integration. While we're at it we might learn a little about ourselves and how we live those values while we do it.

How to follow my blog

Like most people, I have a fairly healthy sized ego.
It's fuelled by being told I'm sexy, mega make-out sessions and people listening attentively to what I have to say.

And YOU can help! Well, with the last part anyway.
Simply look over there on the right - you'll see a little click button with the option to 'follow'. If you have a google account (and if not, why not, gmail, google chrome, blogspot etc, etc. get with it people!) then you can be notified as to when I blog and I can see who's interested in what I'm posting.

Also, leaving comments helps, down there at the bottom of this posting- I never said I was self-motivated!

IN ALL SERIOUSNESS - I've been working on that book thing that's been hanging about the last few years and one of the ways to get publisher interest is by having a blog, preferably one that's 'followed' by lots of people. Who knew that publishing was one big popularity contest?!

So come, on follow me and I promise I'll be funny, entertaining, current and if not these, at least ranty...

Religion, Race and Homophobia - why I am what I am.

I realise several of my rants have been on Religion and Homophobia and no doubt several more will be too. So I wanted to paint a scene for you to help you understand my perspective.

Let's step back in time to 1910 or so. My Great-Grandfather Joseph Ashby, left Barbados and worked his passage over to the UK on a merchant navy ship. I know very little about him other than a few facts, he had a sister called Frances I think and when my Great-Uncle went to Barbados to track his father's family armed with the same scant information, the locals laughed at him - Ashby, having been a plantation owner's name, was as common a surname in Barbados as Smith was in England, and in the large Catholic community, the names Frances and Joseph were common too. What we do know however, was that by the standards of the day he was considerably older than the wife he married soon after, my Great-Gran and that he was black. These two things at this time would have singled the newlyweds out as different from the norm. Not that mixed marriages were illegal (unlike the US at this time), but they were far from commonplace. My Great-Grandfather died during the second world war and my Great-Gran was always elusive with the details of their marriage and courtship providing some speculation regarding her age at the time - marriage at that time was illegal for anyone under 21 without parental consent.

Fast forward sixty years and my Father married my Mother in similar circumstances regarding his race. In the early 70's there was no mixed-race with all it's PC inclusivity- you were either 'colored' or white - one of them or one of us. My Mother tells a story of going to her mother and sitting her down to hear the news that she was dating someone, that it was serious and that he was black. Her reaction was one of horror, horror that my Mum thought his race would ever be an issue for her mother, but it could have easily been a different kind of horror altogether. Nowadays, you look at my Father and like his father before him, he's paled with age, his hair is greying and less afro-looking and yet when you look at his photos from the 70's there he is looking like a young John Conteh (pic). As a child I remember school kids asking me why I had a 'nigger nose', why my Dad was black and my Mother white. Asking 'what did that make me' and determining me a 'half breed'. My sister had it worse. Like my dad and I, she had the full shaped lips which at the time she had yet to grow into and for which she would suffer merciless taunts from the kids at school - but to complicate matters further, unlike me Emma's skin was a dark olive, she tans to this day a very deep bronze brown colour - although now of course she is the envy of her peers - and had long, black, silky and perfectly straight hair. To the kids on our council estate and at school she could be only one thing: a paki.

So from a race perspective, we were an odd lot. My Mum, the standard anglo saxon, fair skinned woman; her tall, 'colored', afro haired husband; her painfully camp, fair skinned, big lipped, nig nosed and afro'd son (old women would want to pat my hair in supermarkets like I was a poodle - I would die of quiet rage and shame); and her daughter, the dark skinned Paki with lips too full to be 'from raand 'ere'. Admittedly by the time our fair skinned, blonde haired, perfectly anglo featured sister came along and was old enough to be going to school, things had changed for the better with our schools having a wider range of people from various ethnicities so less people commented on our varied appearances. They just assumed we had different fathers. My poor Mother.

We went to a Catholic school where we were indoctrinated with the right way to think, pray and behave. The education was a good one. The bashing's from kids from the protestant state school on the way home? Not so good. I remember walking home alone wondering whether my bashing today would be because I was a poof (I never really quite understood what it meant - I was attracted to boys alright, but never quite realized that THAT was what they were talking about), or whether it would be the Catholic me or the Half Breed me that would win out and earn the beating that might be lurking round the corner.

So I got it from all angles. I know what it's like to face prejudice because of racism. Don't get me wrong, I never suffered like Emma suffered and I certainly didn't do it with the stoicism of my sister, but I've been there. And I've had plenty of experiences of homophobia - from the school 'friend' turning on me outside a club when I was 17, trying to impress his girlfriend who had also once been a school friend - (thanks Anthony Mills and Anna Green - she held his coat), to the jumping on Oxford Street of four geezers on three defenceless 'batty boys' - not quite so defenceless as it happens; I'd had less to drink than they had and more than held my own- when I was 24. There've been plenty more and there probably will be again.

I've also suffered the religious dogma of institutionalised religion - it's quite something when a 12 year old boy announces he's joining the priesthood to save his soul from the temptations he's experiencing as a gay adolescent - the terror, the futility, the sense of abandonment that god must think you so low as to curse you with this torture. Mercifully I came to my senses - thank you Ms. Nevins for instructing me on the orthodoxy of Catholicism - it's all original sin and no original thought, just borrowings of older religions.

And there you have it, some of the things that led me to my current state of being, a rabidly Atheist (I like to say I'm religious in my Atheism), white identified (white people identify me as white, black people often question otherwise and only black women ever mention it, but as much as I'd like to be a brutha, I'm as honky as they come), homosexual. Faggot. Gender Bender. Shirt Lifter. Queer. Batty Man. Arse Bandit. Uphill Gardner (you have to love the Welsh sense of humour). I embrace them all. I know who I am. You can use these words too, if you feel comfortable with them. But trust me, if I'm uncomfortable with you using them because I think you mean offence, you'll know about it.

A rod for our own backs...

In case you haven't opened a newspaper today, have yet to see Facebook or are too busy worrying whether your birthday flight to New York is gonna be cancelled due to strike action (alright, that one was me), you may not have heard of the two Malawian men being imprisoned for 14 years each after announcing their engagement.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/gay-couple-sentenced-to-14-years-in-malawi-1977949.html

I'm deeply saddened by the plight of Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjez, simply declaring their relationship depicts a brave stance against their government's position on Gay rights and inequality, yet I wonder why people are calling for boycotts of Malawi all of a sudden, when the list of countries imposing the death sentence for homosexuality seems to have drawn little attention...

Sorry, this image is a crap copy - go here the original, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBT_rights_by_country_or_territory plus a whole heap of info regarding countries that kill and imprison on the grounds of imorality)

Gay people and their supporters need to get wise.

If it's not our governments funding these countries' agendas through aid and trade, it's the gay community funding the hate campaigns of the Mormons by happily buying and dancing to the music of bands like the Killers.

www.mormonwiki.com/brandon_flowers

(this is a gem, the Mormons doing a lovely spin on their favourite rock son!)

Mr. Flowers may be a 'liberal Mormon', but anyone calling themselves a Mormon, liberal or otherwise, tithes to the Mormon church: Ergo you bought an album? You helped pay for Prop. 8. coz we all know the Mormons funded 77% of the campaign to deny gays and lesbians the right to marry. http://www.advocate.com/article.aspx?id=413381338

So yeah, I'm happy to boycott, but are we gonna inform ourselves and organise, or just band wagon jump and take collective pot shots whenever the media decides to trumpet how lucky we gays have it here in the 'liberal' west?