India and Pakinstan now officially recognize the “third gender” of hijara – transgendered people, transvestites, and eunuchs.

The transexual movement for equal rights in South Asia is fascinating and ancient, distinct in many ways from their Western counterparts.

The right to an ID card for a third sexed individual is a recent development there, but in India there are several hijras (or aravanis, as some prefer to be called, after the god Aravan) already who have succeeded in being elected as political officials.

Additionally, hijara are being hired by governments to recover defaulted loans because hijara are believed to possess occult powers.

Electric Children: Pakistan Supreme Court Recognizes Third Gender

Add one more very important name to the growing international list of those opposed to Uganda’s proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill: Bob Hunter, the man who helped build Uganda’s relationship with the Family, aka the Fellowship, the international movement of “followers of Christ” – some reject the term “Christian” that also includes several U.S. politicians with ties to Uganda: among them, Senator James Inhofe, Senator Sam Brownback, and Representative Joe Pitts. [...]

Moreover, Bob adds “I know of no one involved in Uganda with the Fellowship here in America, including the most conservative among them, that supports such things as killing homosexuals or draconian reporting requirements, much less has gone over to Uganda to push such positions.” [...]

Last, but not least at all: The question of the relationship between Bob, the Fellowship, and Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill. Bob argues that any connection at all is “absurd.” He takes particular issue with my statement that the situation in Uganda is “a perfect case study in the export of a lot on American, largely evangelical ideas about homosexuality exported to Uganda.” Bob is now on record expressing his active opposition to the bill, and many of his Fellowship associates are on record expressing a passive opposition to the bill. That’s what matters most here. The question of cultural influence is more complicated. I’ll say this: The member of parliament most strongly associated with the bill, David Bahati, has, as Bob points out, been associated with the Fellowship. Other Fellowship sources say that Bahati floated the idea at a private event linked to the Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast; one source says 2008, Bob thinks it was 2009. What’s most important is that all sources say Fellowship associates politely expressed opposition. Ugandan Minister of Ethics and Integrity James Nsaba Buturo, another strong supporter of the bill, is also linked to the Fellowship (though possibly not as closely as Buturo believes) and an organizer of the Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast. And President Museveni, a longtime Fellowship associate, has given implicit support to the extreme stigmatization of homosexuality, declaring, “European homosexuals are recruiting in Africa.” Other scholars have noted that Museveni’s anti-gay rhetoric has grown strongly over the years, a period during which Uganda has experienced a great religious revival rooted in the years before Museveni took power. One needn’t take anything away from the very real virtues of that revival – it helped overthrow a dictatorship — to condemn its ugly baggage: an inflammation of anti-gay rhetoric, violence, and now new legal measures on top of Uganda’s existing anti-gay laws, antiquated regulations dating back to British colonialism.***

Jeff Sharlet: The Fellowship (aka The Family) Opposes Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill

(Thanks Gavin!)

Jack Donovan: My co-author Nathan Miller and I wrote a book about blood-brotherhood because Mr. Miller originally suggested it to me as an alternative to the ideal of “marriage” which carries too much heterosexual cultural baggage to create an innately masculine bond between two men.

But the book really isn’t about same sex-marriage. It’s about rites between men who were predominantly straight. It’s about male bonding and things that men—specifically men—have done to ritualize their friendships and alliances. Very few books have ever handled this topic, and ours is the only one to pull together so much information from so many diverse sources. In our research, we found blood-brotherhood bonds of various kinds in the recorded practices, literature, folklore and mythology of cultures from all over the world, throughout history. [...]

Nathan F. Miller: It’s very interesting, because similar rituals have been performed by men of Africa, aboriginal Australia, and South America — populations that had been separated from each other for tens of thousands of years! Anthropological study of the blood-brother phenomenon shows certain logics that could apply to men anywhere. One reason is the rituals were meant to create a physical connection in a way that imitated natural biological relationships, but allowing the men to control the bond. Another logic was involved in the idea that the blood of a person was their very life or soul, so for two or more men to mingle their lives together was to create the most sacred bond possible. Yet another idea that often went into blood-bond ceremonies was that blood was such a magical substance that “conditional curses” could be placed on the blood, and the potential oath-breakers. Interestingly, instances of blood brother rituals could show all three logics simultaneously; the men involved would be considered to have become actual brothers, yet also something even more sacred than brothers, and have curse-backed promises tied into the agreement as well.

Greylodge: John Wisniewski Interviews Jack Donovan and Nathan F. Miller

Yesterday, Andrew Sullivan put up a post about an extremely brutal hate-crime attack on an openly gay man. The 2-minute news report he embeds is depressing, but there was something to laugh about at the end. The studio interviewed one of the attackers’ friends, who proudly displayed this tattoo.

It’s a tattoo reading “[Thou] shall not lie with a male as one does with a woman. It is an abomination. Leviticus 18:22?. Who else sees the problem here?

Leviticus also forbids tattooing. In the very next chapter.

“Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD. Leviticus 19:28?

The Friendly Atheist: Why is this anti-gay Leviticus tattoo extra absurd?

(via Paul Bingman)

Human Rights Watch is trying to help Iraqi homosexuals flee the country:

Long and Moumneh formulated a plan. They would build an underground railroad of sorts, reaching out to gay men in Iraq through the Internet and their existing contacts in Iraq, then advising and supporting gay Iraqis until they could ferry them to a safe city somewhere in Iraq, then to a haven elsewhere in the region, and eventually perhaps to the West.

Why?

It has never been easy being gay in Iraq. During the Saddam Hussein era, open homosexuality wasn’t technically outlawed, but it was effectively forbidden, and harassment and torture of gay people, if sporadic, were not unknown. After the American-led invasion of the country in 2003, a similar atmosphere persisted. Fadi was 12 years old during the American invasion, so he had little knowledge of what it was like to be gay under Saddam, but as far back as a year and a half ago, he was walking past his local hussainiyah (a Shia gathering place similar to a mosque) when a man at the entrance of the building called out to him. “Come in for a minute,” the man said. Fadi knew there was no point in running because they knew where he lived. He assumed the man calling him over was from the Mahdi Army. He walked to the door of the hussainiyah thinking, This is the end for me. After some ten hours of being whipped, kicked, and spit on, Fadi was told to pick himself up off the floor and get dressed. “This is a warning for you,” one of his tormentors told him. “Tell people like you what happened to you.”

As virulent as the violence against gay people (men mostly) was, it operated at a kind of low hum for many years, overshadowed by the country’s myriad other problems. But in February of this year, something changed. There was no announcement, no fatwa, no openly declared policy by a cleric or militia leader or politician, but a wave of anti-gay hysteria hit the country. An Iraqi TV station, with disapproving commentary, showed a video of a group of perhaps two dozen young men at a private dance party, wiggling their hips like female belly dancers. Terms like the third sex and puppies, a newly coined slur, began to appear in hostile news reports. Shia and Sunni clerics started to preach in their Friday sermons about the evils of homosexuality and “the people of Lot.” Police officers stepped up their harassment of openly gay men. Families and tribes cast out their gay relatives. The bodies of gay men like Mazen and Namir, often mutilated, began turning up on the street. There is no way to verify the number of tortured or harassed, but the best available estimates place that figure in the thousands. Hundreds of men are believed to have been killed.

NY Magazine: The Hunted

(via OVO)

The Laramie Project 10 Years Later is an expanded version of the stage play about the murder of Matthew Shepard, and includes an epilogue based on interviews with one of Shepard’s killers, Aaron McKinney.

Pierotti logged more than 10 hours of interviews with McKinney, but failed to get the killer to express any remorse.

“As far as Matt is concerned, I don’t have any remorse,” McKinney is quoted as saying in the script.

When pressed again on the question of regret, McKinney said he was sorry for Shepard’s family and that his life had taken such a bad turn.

“Yeah, I got remorse. But probably not the way people want me to,” McKinney said. “I got remorse that I didn’t live the way my dad taught me to live.”

CBC: Laramie Project adds killer’s words as epilogue

I don’t think that hate crimes should be punished any more or less harshly than other murders. But this should put an end to the discussion over whether Shepard’s murder was a hate crime.

(Thanks Josh)

Also not from the Onion:

In an infamous moment at the Values Voter Summit over the weekend, captured on video by Dave Weigel, Sen. Tom Coburn’s (R-OK) chief of staff Michael Schwartz made the case against pornography. “All pornography is homosexual pornography,” said Schwartz, quoting an ex-gay friend of his, “because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards.”

Schwartz then explained the side benefit of this finding — that if boys know pornography will make them gay, they’ll never touch it, taking advantage of what Schwartz sees as a natural homophobia. “And if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to get a copy of Playboy?” he said. “I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants!”

Video at TPMDC

Alan Turing was a World War II code-breaker. He was also gay.

Fifty-five years after the mathematician committed suicide, Downing Street has apologised for the “appalling” way in which he was treated because of his sexuality.

According to Winston Churchill, Turing made the single biggest contribution to Allied victory in the war against Nazi Germany.

His pivotal role in cracking intercepted messages helped the Allies to defeat the Nazis in several crucial battles.

BBC: Alan Turing Profile

If we wanted to deny Amazon all benefit of the doubt, and to construct the maximum case against them, it would go something like this: it was stupid to have a categorization system that would allow LGBT-themed books to be de-ranked en masse; it was stupid to have a technological system that would allow that to happen easily and globally; it was stupid to remove sales rank from sexually explicit works, rather than adding “Safe Search” options; it was stupid to speak in PR-ese to the public about something that really matters; it was stupid to take as long as they did to dribble an explanation out.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid, yes, all true. If it had been a critique of those stupidities that circulated over the weekend, without the intentional mass de-listing, it would have kicked off a long, thoughtful conversation about metadata, system design, and public relations. Those are good conversations to have, we need to have them, but they are not conversations that would enrage thousands of people in the space of a few hours and kick off calls for boycotts and worse.

Clay Shirkey: The Failure of #amazonfail

(via StephenWalling)

The Iowa Supreme Court legalized gay marriage Friday in a unanimous and emphatic decision that makes Iowa the third state — and the first in the nation’s heartland — to allow same-sex couples to wed.

In its decision, the high court upheld a lower court’s ruling that found a state law restricting marriage to between a man and woman violated Iowa’s constitution.

“We are firmly convinced the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective,” the Supreme Court wrote in its decision. “The Legislature has excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification.”

MSNBC: Iowa gay marriage ban ruled unconstitutional

(via