Gayborhoods...where gays live happily

From www.edgenewyork.com

Even on a weekday in winter, the Castro district vibrates with energy, most of it male. Men holding hands, walking dogs and lounging at cafes have long been the main attraction in a neighborhood known as a gay mecca the world over.

Yet where visitors see a living monument to gay pride, longtime community leader Brian Basinger sees a cultural enclave at risk of becoming a faded museum piece - or worse, a place where men who love men may one day feel like they don’t belong.

"When I see a stroller now, I see it as someone who evicted a person with AIDS, right or wrong," said Basinger, president of the Harvey Milk Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transexual Democratic Club.

For more than 30 years, most big cities have had a district either explicitly or implicitly understood to be the place to go if you were gay - the West Village and Chelsea in New York City, Washington’s Dupont Circle, Boston’s South End.

But as gays and lesbians win legal rights and greater social acceptance, community activists worry these so-called "gayborhoods" are losing their relevance. Like the bedsheet-sized rainbow flag rippling majestically at the intersection marking the entrance to the Castro, they are at a historical crossroads.

"What I’ve heard from some people is, ’We don’t need the Castro anymore because essentially San Francisco is our Castro,"’ said Don Romesburg, who co-chairs the GLBT Historical Society.

Don Reuter, a New York writer who is researching a book on the rise and fall of a dozen gay neighborhoods in the U.S., has observed the same trend in cities as far-flung as New Orleans, Philadelphia and Seattle. He found "Disneyfied" places boasting chain stores, restaurants catering to a diverse clientele and "cleared of any reference to sex."

"What makes these neighborhoods gay? Not much," concluded Reuter, who predicts that outside New York, San Francisco and a handful of other cities, neighborhoods with a significant gay presence will not survive.

In the early 1970s, an atmosphere of wild abandon prevailed in districts often referred to as "gay ghettos." Men who had kept their sexual orientations hidden reveled in the freedom of leading openly gay lives for the first time. The nonstop party dragged to a painful halt in the 1980s with the onset of AIDS, Reuter said, but the crisis also solidified gay communities even as it decimated them.

Now, as the fear of AIDS has abated, the neighborhoods have become attractive to developers and investors trying to encourage families and empty-nesters to return to city centers, said Reuter.

Besides the brigades of baby strollers in the Castro, ominous signs include the security gates installed last year by a local hotel to discourage "cruising," and the recent closings of two longtime stores, one that sold leather goods and the other bath products. National retail chains like Pottery Barn and Diesel now occupy prominent Castro locations.

Several nonprofit agencies serving the gay community have also moved out due to rising rents. Meanwhile, 500 new apartments and condominiums are planned for the area, half of which have been designated as "family housing."

But no one is suggesting that the Castro has been overrun by heterosexuals just yet.

After the Cape Cod resort of Provincetown, Mass., the neighborhood has the nation’s highest concentration of same-sex couples, according to 2005 census estimates. And San Francisco as a whole ranks first among cities, with gay and lesbian residents making up 15 percent of the population.

"I think people are looking for something to worry about," said Betty Sullivan, a writer and event producer who lives in the Castro. "I take the fact that some straight people want to live here as a compliment."

But some activists point to cities with less-established gay districts as a sign of what could happen.

Honolulu’s Kuhio district stands vacant after its gay bars were dispersed in the late 1980s. In Atlanta’s Midtown, once the gayest area of that city, gay nightclubs recently have given way to condominiums.

When Basinger walks through the Castro these days, he see the apartment building where he watched friends with AIDS die, too pricey these days for someone young, old or sick to afford. Or the corner where his efforts at community organizing are met with yawns. Up the street, the raunchy window displays at sex toy shops have brought complaints from parents, both gay and straight.

"We have Chinatown and Japantown and so forth, and that’s important for minority communities in this country, to have a place where they can get a sense of being the majority," said Joe Curtin, an architect who serves as president of Castro Area Planning Action. "But if you took those away, you would still have China and Japan. If the Castro goes away as a gay neighborhood, there is nowhere else."

From 2000 to 2005, the 10 states with the biggest increases in the percentage of gay couples were all in the Midwest, says Gary Gates, a demographer for the Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA that specializes in sexual orientation and the law.

"Thirty years ago, if I lived in the Midwest and I was gay, my thought was I would go to San Francisco or New York," Gates said. "Now, a person can go to Kansas City and find a fairly active and open gay community."

Sandy Sachs, a nightclub owner in gay-friendly West Hollywood, has started promoting special dance nights for straight Iranians, Israelis and Russians because her gay clientele has fallen off. Club owners in other cities told her they are doing the same.

"I still maintain gay nights at my club, but I’m not solely gay," said Sachs, who noted that many gay men and lesbians now prefer to meet potential partners on the Internet. "The community doesn’t support that kind of thing anymore."

Another factor contributing to what Reuter calls the "devolution" of gay neighborhoods is the attitude of young gays and lesbians who feel comfortable mixing with people of different genders and sexual orientations.

"We don’t want to ostracize ourselves," said Matty Lamos, 20, who moved to San Francisco from nearby Petaluma three years ago.

Basinger, Curtin and other San Francisco activists agree it’s a good thing that gay people no longer feel restricted to the Castro, but fear younger generations will overlook the struggles that went into building the neighborhood.

"When you are a minority, you have to be the wedge, and the Castro is it," he said. "The people who are coming in here and colonizing the Castro, they are exercising their priorities. Whether they are heterosexual priorities or economic priorities, they are not our priorities."

As featured on www.edgenewyork.com

Medium Is the Message for Gay NYC Bloggers
by Ambrose Aban
EDGE News Contributor
Friday Mar 30, 2007

MIND BLOGGERING

The way they throw stuff up ont he Net these days, shaping who we are, breaking news even primetime superstars, Anderson Cooper and Diane Sawyer, are missing or not aware of so quickly, killing journalism and democratizing the mainstream media.

It is mindblowing the way bloggers blog these days. Screaming for our attention, they demand to be heard. At least some of the time, they succeed in feeding our appetite for juicy bits and pieces of the truth, or even real breaking news that rivals what all-news TV channels are giving us.

Notable New York-based gay bloggers include Andrew Belonsky, David Hauslaib, Andy Towle, Seth Abramovitch, Ethan Gray, Joe Jervis, Sascha, Pauline Park, Big Mouth and John Aravosis. These increasingly well known figures have become more and more influential as a new breed of journalist, creating greater awareness of gay culture in general. And they aren’t just playing around, either.

Some of them have scooped USA Today, the Washington Post, CNN and other mainstream media outlets. They have not only immersed themselves in communications technology, but have also helped change attitude and mindsets as they propel controversial stories into public consciousness.

Call them bloggers and you are missing the point. Call them journalists, and you’ll also sell them short; however, if they are more than that, it is hard to categorize them.

Sometimes, in fact, they are just your neighbors who happen to be more vocal and opinionated. As one of them readily and happily admitted in an interview, he relishes the notion of having creative freedom and blogging is a great way for him to create a public discussion.

"I am motivated by a number of things these days--other than my bank account--as I try to entertain and inform," says the editor-in-chief of Queerty, Andrew Belonsky, only half-jokingly. "We don’t aspire to be news readers. We put a spin on things for our readers’ amusement. But we’re still trying to make sure they know what’s happening where, when, how and why."

Belonsky, who is not one to let his brain run idle, says the diversity of the community is what is keeping him thinking very hard these days. It’s an issue that’s weighed on him since the beginning of his activitism. At one point, in his more optimistic younger days, he thought that a queer utopia--a place where all gayboys could come together and be pals--would someday come to fruition.

"I don’t anymore," he now says. "I realized there could be no one type of community--regardless of sexuality, race, religion. You know, people are shaped by too many factors to relate to everyone else, especially for such an arbitrary reason as one’s sexuality."

What really burns him up is when people refer to "the gay community" as a monolith. "It’s ridiculous," he says. "I think that we need to celebrate the fact that there are different types of gay people--and, of course, all people--and realize that the only thing some groups have in common is that they lack basic civil rights and, of course, sleep with people of the same sex."

Belonsky says he’s also motivated because he believes in what he calls "our mission." "Homosexuality is by far the most divisive issue in America," he notes. "As I wrote in one of my posts, ’gay’ may count as one of the most common words in the English language. And that’s saying something. It’s important to me that our readers understand the homo happenings, but also that the gays--ourselves included--are kept in check."

Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God blog, agrees. "We might see a bit of the power of the blogosphere in this country--the power to make business listen to customers," he says. "To right wrongs is very inspiring. This is the kind of thing that makes us tick." Jervis further happily confesses that blogging has made him more friends than thousands of nights spent hanging out in gay bars. On a selfish level, he says it has immeasurably improved his social life.

"Over the last year and a half my focus had turned to gay activism and general gay culture, with only the occasional short story, running features such as HomoQuotable in which I provide quotes from current gay newsmakers," he says.

Jervis is finally adding advertisers, something he swore he’d never do. "I’ve never dreamed that my readership would explode to the level it is today, making advertising much more lucrative," he explains.

Jervis says he lets the news of the day inspire him to blog. "I am continually torn between my distaste for the rise in PC culture and my desire to see those that bad-mouth gay people get punished," he says. "For example, the silly punishments meted out on students who say, ’That’s so gay’, versus Ann Coulter’s usage of ’faggot’."

Meanwhile, Sascha, the founder of BigQueer, which houses arguably the most active group of gay bloggers, says one of the things that is keeping her thinking hard these days is the horrific injustices that queer immigrants and their partners are forced to deal with every day, "from not being able to sponsor their non-U.S. citizen partners for green cards to the HIV ban that can be waived for straights because they can marry but not for queers. I’ve been very involved personally and professionally with Immigration Equality (www.immigrationequality.org) and it’s shocking how little the queer community, let alone the straight community, knows about these injustices that are fundamentally human rights violations," she says.

Big Mouth, (a.k.a Rey Patmamat) is a playwright by day and a regular contributor on BigQueer. "Unfortunately, writing plays often involves being entertaining and not alienating people too much so the audience hangs around till the end to get whatever message you’ve built into the piece, while still feeling like the play was worth the ticket price," he says. Online, he does not feel the need to entertain so much as he can skip straight to the message.

"They’re paying what they pay every month and can read me or not, and I can pretty much say whatever the hell I want however I want," he says. "I mostly write about the issues of gay America--voting, marriage equality, gay identity in relations to language, ethnicity, and perception, mostly beyond the closet."

Big Mouth says his most recent posts on BigQueer were about the increasing use of the word "faggot" and its derivations ("fag," "faggotry"). Another post considered what it means to be a gay man who wants to get pegged by Jenny Shimizu, which was a cross-post from his personal blog Play Rey Play (http://playreyplay.blogspot.com).

Big Mouth says he thinks a lot about what changed in the world that made gay people stop being queer. "We used to fight for such strange and diverse things as sex positivity, medical reform, cultural representation, and anti-hate legislation; listen to L7 and Pansy Division, and watch Sally Porter, Gregg Araki and Derek Jarman films. Now we fight to have traditional families, rally around self-loathing boy-band members and crooked politicians who exploit their sexuality for personal gain--and pop in DVDs of Will Truman never, ever having sex!"

Call them bloggers and you are missing the point. Call them journalists, and you’ll also sell them short.Sascha truly believes that blogs have a direct impact on society by connecting people around the world and enabling us to develop communities and sub-cultures based on ideology, not geography. She believes that the greatest benefit of a blog is how quickly and easily it spreads information how and anyone with Internet access can start publishing immediately.

Sascha is quick to point out that BigQueer is not a news publication and not looking to break news. "Our little group of queers at BigQueer represents a diverse cross-section of the queer community," she adds. "We don’t always agree on issues like marriage, sexual racism, outing, Mary Cheney, or politics; but neither does the global queer community."

BigQueer, she adds, was created to explore the different ideas percolating in the community and dig deeper into topics. Instead of breaking the story, the BigQueer bloggers hope, after a few days or weeks or months pass, to explore a topic critically. But that’s not to say that they don’t appreciate humor and the occasional fluff pieces.

"We’re not doing this for profit or as a business so we have a little more flexibility than many publications in the length and timeliness of our posts," adds Sascha.

Trans-activist Pauline Park, of www.paulinepark.com (also an active blogger on BigQueer), believes they are all fans of their "rivals" and competitors who consistently do the same heavy lifting and provide a sort of gay news clearinghouse for folks to easily learn of issues critical to their lives.

The bloggers at BigQueer all say they like Towleroad because Andy Towle and his team of bloggers are a well-rounded source of cultural information. Park says blogging enables her to communicate directly with an audience unmediated through the media, including the gay media. Most of her contributions to BigQueer have been about transgender issues. Her latest piece concerns the termination of Steve Stanton as city manager of Largo, Fla., following the public announcement of his decision to transform from male to female. She is also working hard on the violent arrest of Nadine Smith, the black lesbian executive director of Equality Florida, for advocating on his behalf.

They all agree on something important: That the current group of established gay organizations aren’t speaking for the gay man and lesbian on the street anymore, but kowtow to the powers-that-be. "I wish that it weren’t true," says Ray "Big Mouth" Patmamat, "but it is. We are overdue for a good, outspoken queer who will lead us to really shake things up and change the system. Love him or hate him, Larry Kramer did it in the ’80s and no one really has done the same since.

"As long as we depend on or believe in ridiculous institutions like the Human Rights Campaign to fight our battles," Patmamat continues, "we’re not going anywhere winning anything. I mean, they’re lobbyists--they’re not trying to change hearts or minds. They’re part of what’s wrong with our government, not a path toward what’s right about it. Rather than being the outsider voice that can finger wag and force on society the perspective it’s lacking, so much of queerness in the 2000s has been about in-fighting. Whenever we’ve done that before, we’ve gotten trampled, topped, bottomed. Pick your position."

Sascha has spent a lot of time reading pioneering gay activist Doug Ireland (direland.typepad.com/direland), who has become especially active in the situation in Arab countries, which are among the most anti-gay in the world. She says she appreciates the editorial focus of Jeremy Hooper as well. And she also doesn’t believe that we have a leader. But she differs from Patmamat in that she doesn’t think that’s necessarily bad.

On the contrary, Sascha says that a "thought leader" conjures up Orwellian images. "We’re developing a decentralized yet collective thought leadership that is made up of the ideas of many people from many backgrounds and cultures," she says. "It is constructed and deconstructed by and for the community repeatedly through our various media forms." Perhaps this change, she adds, has come about in part as we have moved from broadcast media, which encourages passive involvement, to interactive media, which encourages interaction with form and content more directly.

"We’re seeing is a generational and ideological split in gay activism," Belonsky adds. "We have older generation who stand behind some of the more established and press-ready leaders, such as Larry Kramer. And then we have a younger, seemingly quieter generation who use different tactics to make their politically-minded moves." He cites Lane Hudson as an example of the latter--although he hastens to add that direct action and street protests can get you only so far.

Belonsky believes that the very fact that there is no queer "community" means that there is no single gay leader or even cadre of leaders. "There are indeed many fronts in our fight," he says. "That’s the beauty of being queer: There’s no one type. We don’t all need to be homies. We do, however, need to fight for basic civil rights."

Ethan Gray of ShadeofGray, a gay blog which won The Verve Awards 2006 for Best Blog Writing, says that "one of the reasons I think the community is lagging is that so many organizations that are supposed to be looking after our interests are mired in red tape, incompetence and more importantly, politics. They could all use a nice kick in the groin."

Gray, currently working on a new story about an old theme, the proverbial ex, is taking stock of his personal life. He’s busy blogging about "that one ex even years later can drive us insane." I’ve met him!

For all these bloggers, after posting a fleeting thought, curious insight, personal theory or random rant on their blogs, they all seem to go off and attend their regular business for a few hours. Then they return to their e-mail boxes and sort through the messages.

"In this quiet, exhilarating, and scary moment, they realize that people are listening to them, and they care about what they have to say, discovering their voice is a liberating and revolutionary feeling, " says a fan of Andy Towle, Seth Abramovits and Andrew Sullivan.

Indeed, people are changed by this experience and become thoroughly immersed in the world of blogging. Certainly, the pursuit of new ideas, creative partners and reader contact consumes many hours of the day, especially with Web outlets churning out stories and videos that quickly gain traction across the Internet.

If nothing else, blogging gives us the chance to record events that are happening in the worlds of technology and science, silly jokes that occur to us, accomplishments and worries, and just random posts. "The more notable gay bloggers add color to our world. And no doubt are a force to be reckoned with," says Gray. "I think they force people to think twice or hard before messing with the gays."

Laugh if you want, but this, too, is a form of activism. The best of the bloggers anger us, inspire us and finally move us to action outside of the virtual world, in the very real world of physical action.

Str8 Sex With Gay?

As featured on www.edgenewyork.com

Study: Straight Men are Having Gay Sex

Nearly one in 10 men who say they’re straight have sex with other men, a recent New York City survey found. And 70% of those straight-identified men having sex with men are married to women.

In fact, 10% of all married men in the survey report same-sex behavior during the past year.

In 2003, a team led by Preeti Pathela, DrPH, of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, performed telephone interviews with nearly 4,200 New York City men. Interviews were conducted in English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Polish, and Haitian Creole.

In nearly every previous study of sexual behavior, the percentage of men who reported sex with men was higher than the percentage of men who reported being gay.

So Pathela and her colleagues first asked the participants if they were bisexual, gay, or straight. Then they asked about specific sexual behaviors.

Some of the findings include the following:

- Straight-identified men who have sex with men report fewer sex partners than gay-identified men.

- Straight-identified men who have sex with men report fewer STDs in the past year than gay-identified men.

- Straight-identified men who have sex with men are less likely than gay-identified men to report using a condom during their last sexual encounter.

- Straight-identified men who have sex with men are more likely to be foreign born than gay-identified men.

Because they report fewer STDs and fewer sex partners than gay-identified men, straight-identified men who have sex with men may think they are at a lower risk of HIV and STDs. Pathela notes that this isn’t necessarily so.

The men with whom these straight-identified men have sex may themselves have multiple sex partners and elevated STD and HIV risk, and the low rate of condom use makes the straight-identified men vulnerable.

This means safe-sex messages aimed at straight and gay men are likely missing this important subgroup, suggests Pathela.

"To reduce the burden of sexually-transmitted diseases and HIV infection among men who have sex with men, it is of utmost importance for [health care] providers to take a sexual history that ascertains the sex of a partner," Pathela reports. "Asking about a patient’s sexual identity will not adequately assess his risk."

Instead, "prevention messages should focus on the activities that pose risk - for example, unprotected receptive anal sex - and should not be framed to appeal solely to gay-identified men," Pathela suggests.

The findings appeared in the Sept. 19, 2006 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Hotels turned gays away...

[I copy and pasted this post from my favorite gay blogger Andy Towle]

This clearly shouldn't have happened to gay or straight people. This is the reason why we gay people are relentless in our effort to find a cure for homophobia.

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SC Couple Says Hotel Turned Them Away for Being Gay!

A gay couple together for two and a half years says that Affordable Suites of America, a long-term stay hotel located in Sumter, South Carolina, turned them away because they are gay. Jason Pickel and Darren Black Bear say they inquired about renting a room at the hotel while they search for a home.

Said Pickel: "We were inquiring about the price, deposits, extra person fee, and she asked who the room was going to be for, and I said for my partner and I. She said, 'Oh we don't rent to multiple people of the same sex.' I said, so you don't rent to gay couples? She said, 'No, we don't rent to gay people at all.'"

News19 of Columbia called the hotel to follow up. They were told by the hotel receptionist: "Our policy is we don’t rent to two people of the same sex if we only have one bed." Carol Atkisson, the hotel's owner, says there was a misunderstanding: "He says any couple can come to the place and they will rent to them, period. Atkisson says the policy was not mean to target homosexuals. He says they were just trying to stop two single people from being in the same bed."

According to News19, "Currently, there is no state law preventing a hotel from refusing service to a same-sex couple. However, it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, creed, color, national origin, gender, disability, or marital status."

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Barack Obama on Homosexual Morality and Gay Marriage

Barack Obama talked to Wolf Blitzer on yesterday's The Situation Room and clarified his actions and statements following Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Peter Pace's remarks that homosexuality is "immoral". Obama and Hillary Clinton were criticized shortly after Pace's remarks for refusing to say whether or not they agreed with him.

Said Obama: "I'm not sure that the story got out there properly. I mean, what happened was I was leaving a firefighters' union meeting and trying to get in my car and did not respond to a reporter's query at that point. I wasn't responding to reporters period because I was trying to make a vote. Subsequently I made it very clear. I don't think that gays and lesbians are any more moral or immoral than heterosexuals and that I think it is very important for us to reexamine the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy because it's costing us millions of dollars in replacing troops that by all accounts are actually doing a good job but are simply being kicked out of the military because of their sexual orientation."

He also reiterated his feelings about gay marriage and civil unions:

"Well, I think that 'marriage' has a religious connotation in this society, in our culture, that makes it very difficult to disentangle from the civil aspects of marriage. And as a consequence it's almost -- it would be extraordinarily difficult and distracting to try to build a consensus around marriage for gays and lesbians. What we can do is form civil unions that provide all the civil rights that marriage entails to same sex couples. And that is something that I have consistently been in favor of. And I think that the vast majority of Americans don't want to see gay and lesbian couples discriminated against, when it comes to hospital visitations and so on."

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Gay Detroit Senior Andrew Anthos Was Not Attacked

Detroit Police said on Wednesday that gay senior Andrew Anthos, who was reportedly attacked in front of his apartment with a pipe of February 13 after his assailant had taunted him over his sexuality, died of natural causes and was never attacked.

This has been the account: "According to family members, Anthos said he was riding a city bus home from the library on Feb. 13 when a young man asked him if he was gay and uttered a slur. Anthos said the man followed him off the bus and confronted him again. Anthos said he told the man he was gay as he went to help a friend whose wheelchair was stuck in a snowbank, according to his cousin, Athena Fedenis."

In the days following the incident, Anthos, 72, clung to life in a Detroit hospital before slipping into a coma and dying.

According to the AP, "the Wayne County Medical Examiner's Office concluded that Anthos fell because he had an arthritic neck, and detectives were unable to find witnesses to a beating, police said...Medical Examiner Dr. Carl Schmidt said evidence did not support the report of an attack on Anthos and said a head injury likely came from falling. Anthos probably flexed his neck, which caused arthritic spurs to compress his spinal cord enough to paralyze his legs, Schmidt said."

Said police spokesman James Tate to the Detroit News: "There's no evidence that an assault occurred. They determined that he died of natural causes."

Homicide unit supervisor Lt. Linda Vertin said the case would be closed due to lack of evidence of an assault. The report of the attack on Anthos sparked a renewed outcry in Michigan and across the country from gay advocacy groups for hate crime legislation.

The AP notes, "It was unclear what police made of the friend's account." It's also unclear where police came up with a sketch of Anthos' attacker which was released on March 1st.

Athena Fedenis, Anthos' cousin, whom police did not talk to before going public with their findings, expressed shock that the case was closed: "I'm just livid about this. Andrew didn't have any reason to make this up. I won't let this rest. I can't let this tarnish him. I don't want anyone to think it wasn't a hate crime."

Police, coroner: Detroit gay man died naturally, not from beating [Detroit News]
Police Say Gay Man Not Fatally Beaten [NYT]

Another chance please...

Being Anglican, I am just as anxious about the meeting of Anglican leaders in Tanzania last month -- the meeting reportedly issued an ultimatum that the U.S. denomination pledge not to consecrate another partnered gay bishop. Openly gay Rev. Gene Robinson became the first bishop to be ordanied by the Episcopal Church in 2003, causing consternation among the Anglican Communion and some conservative American congregations.

But the debate over how to respond to the Anglican Communion was nothing but contentious and, in fact, another report says, united most conservative and liberal bishops alike according to the Rev. Susan Russell, a member of the Human Rights Campaign's Religion Council and president of the national Episcopal LGBT advocacy organization , Integrity USA.

Hmmm...we may look back at the rather draconian ultmatums that came out of the primates last month as a blessing in disguise.

Hate Crime Bill. Will it pass?

In Washington a bipartisan group of members of congress on Tuesday reportedly introduced federal hate crimes legislation in the US House of Rep that include protections for Americans based on sexual orientation and gender identity. If passed, the legislation would make violent crime prosecutable as hate crimes when the victim is targeted because of his or her gender, disability, sexual orientation or gender identity. Quite the same like the one passed by the House last year but was blocked by the Senate. Let's hope it passes this time.

Aviance attackers caught!

And pleaded guilty in New York last Wednesday for beating fabulous singer, Kevin Aviance, to a second degree gang assault as hate crime. And two of them will receive prison terms of eight years! Yes! Wish they got more. Last june the four men aged 17-22 beat Aviance in an East Village gay bar. The drag queen suffered a broken jaw. But still looks absolutely fabulous.

ROXY, AVALON, SPLASH, SANCTUARY, FRESH...

It wasn't our last dance! We still can dance somewhere else. Trust me. There's plenty of clubs we still can go to dance the night away. Roxy's closing its door last Saturday night is not the end. It is, tho, the end of Roxy, the place where homos and queers alike got into trouble. Roxy may have been the world's #1 dance clubs for gay men and all of us who passed through its door as a place where all was perfect - a bodies of A-list gay men dancing through the night.

Also, we should be ok that Roxy is now the thing of the past. Let's snap our fingers and move on. Know that while this club was hot, it certainly has helped gay men dance through the nightmare of HIV/AIDS epidemic...it was also a context in which the strobing lights, excellent mixings of the DJs, and rampant drug use, of everything from alcohol to crystal meth, worked synergistically to make us forget about our own collective responsibilities and helped fuel the epidemic which continues to take its toll on us today.

In the end , is that the mixture of the good and the bad often get muddled, creating historical inaccuracy. Oh whatever. Roxy is gone. But life goes on.

BE HAPPY, NOT GAY?

April 18 is recognized as a National Day of Silence, on which students can chose not to speak as protest against unfair treatment of homosexuals.

When one student chose to wear an anti-gay T-shirt in response to that protest, school administrators took action, and refused to let her wear it. Now she and another student suing the school, saying they violated her first amendment rights.

In the suit, filed by Hedi Zamecnik, 17, and another student, Alexander Nuxoll, 14, Zamecnik claims she faced unlawful discrimination and humiliation (one school administrator told her to remove the shirt, another told her to cross out the offending language with a marker) because school officials didn't agree with her viewpoint.

On the front, the shirt read: "MY DAY OF SILENCE, STRAIGHT ALLIANCE," and on the back it read: "BE HAPPY, NOT GAY."

The Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian litigation group representing Zamecnik says that "This is a fundamental First Amendment Issue," and that similar lawsuits filed across the nation are attempts to "enable Christian students to express a contrasting viewpoint on homosexuality."

Seeing as the courts already allow schools to restrict free speech with it's prejudicial against other minority groups, I don't see why they'd rule any differently in this circumstance.

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AND ISN'T IT TIME ALREADY? Historic issues

In September 2004 Gay Times had a controversial advertising campaign on the London Underground with pictures of their September issue front cover, that proved popular with Gay Times readers. It was the first advertising campaign to feature a gay kiss, attracting only one complaint that was later thrown out by the Advertising Standards Agency.

From March 2007, Gay Times has re-labeled itself GT, announcing: "The Future's Here: Are You Up For It? New Look. New Attitude. New Sections. New Writers. New Style. Gay Times becomes GT"

Battle of the TV shows!

Dancing With The Stars Vs American Idol

Not eager to see Fox parading around with “Dancing’s” head on a spike, ABC wisely moved the performance shows from Tuesday to Monday for this season, avoiding the behemoth that is “American Idol.”

Still, fourth seasons can be about the time that high-concept competition shows start to really flag — “The Apprentice,” “The Amazing Race,” and even “Survivor” had ho-hum fourth seasons.

Can “Dancing” keep chugging along, or is it about time for a slump?

Watch two-time champion, Cheryl Burke, and her gorgeous celebrity partner, Ian Ziering, tearing the dance floor and cha-cha-ing their way to a solid triple 7 point in this season's first week of the DWTS.

Battle of the sex sites

CUMMING TOGETHER

HX Magazine, Friday March 23, 2007
By Ambrose Aban
HX Contributor



As sex sites continue to offer plenty of options while demand goes beyond sizes (and lengths), new players live up to great erections. In a battle that is on the edge of cumming, are you still gay.com?

Cover Story | Ambrose Aban

Recently I stumbled upon an ad on a new free sex site “I wish that I was in your arms, like that Spanish guitar. And you would play me through the night. Till the dawn.” stealing from Toni Braxton’s saccharine-sweet lines to attract top Spanish men on this cold, snowy Valentine’s night.

No one will not be swept away by the passion and the longing, sultry sounds of that ad. A month later, there is still something about the ad that keeps me imagining myself being played …till dawn.

On another site, a one liner “A King is a King but a Ruler is 12 inches!” is telling slim, smooth and hot bottoms to look nowhere else for fun, asking them to screw love (because love hurts) and persuading them to double click on his ad and inviting them to “come and get it”.

We see many of such ads - they are persuasive (and they get noticed, too) as more and more new and improved sites continue to pop up on our little screen – all screaming for attention, shouting urban gay chic, and proclaiming to be the coolest, the best, the hottest, and the largest. With the competition getting fiercer among the top sites and the new ones, where do we begin and how do we stand out in the crowd in this virtual world – a dense mix of real horny men looking for their types, pouring out their souls, unlocking their private pictures, hoping to get laid by their Mr. Right Now?

As many first generation sites failing to pick up speed and starting to slowly losing their touch, members are jumping ship to new high-tech sites like Dlist.com, Mate1.com, Recon.com, Passion.com, OkCupid.com, MyPinkDating.com, MeonYou.com and Singlesnet.com that offer extra cool stuff on the side – blog, webcams, videos, music, and other extras to enhance and maximize the experience.

How we do pick a site in which to post our ad that is perfect for us – one that provides us the most bang for the buck?

If Gay.com is getting too conventional for us, and Myspace is way too certifiable or Manhunt and Adam4Adam way too sleazy for our taste, where do we look to find a site that is pleasantly offbeat and unconventional where real horny people are looking for RT (real time) and not exchanging 1000 emails only to say they are still in Colorado Spring!

Finding a new site makes the transition easier and simpler for us who have tried to part ways with our dating (or sex) sites for so long and join new ones.

But can these new sites top longer and pound harder than their seniors?

Many people took out their ads and canceled their premium memberships on AOL, Gay.com, Manhunt and other paid sites and now find guys on Recon.com, saying this site is the only one that asks question ‘What are you into?’ and gives it to you.

OkCupid.com, Mate1.com and BigMuscle.com (and its affiliated site, Normalguys.com) are offering fresh meat of different sizes and shapes - big muscles, twinks or baby bears - you name it plus new features such as expanded buddy list and other sophisticated outfits to make your online experience an orgasmic one.

Others like Mypinkdating.com, MeonYou.com and Passion.com are targeting the romantic types and kinky sex while Singlesnet.com aims to reenergize the scene by offering hot, passionate singles around the world. They are building a space that is supportive of expression and intent on establishing a venue for sex amidst the fears of sex site glut.

But are they anything like their senior such as Manhunt which is serving, educating and now guiding men along the way? What do we know about these new sites we call home most nights? Not much.

But the truth is there are sites that are genuinely giving back to the society. And one such site is Manhunt. Realizing that there are certainly stigmas that arise from running a ‘sex-positive” site, Manhunt advises members to always have safer sex while supporting studies and testing groups to help find new treatments for various diseases that affect us all by working directly with many health organizations worldwide. Members can email to them directly, ask questions, and get answers.

Manhunt will never allow any mention of illegal substances, not even phrases such as ‘pnp’ on its site. That’s classy!

“All profiles are approved by our customer support team and any references of this nature are flagged and removed,” its Promotions Manager, Michael MacDonald, warns.

Manhunt maybe getting older, wiser and classier, and new sites it once shun are looking to it for inspiration as they are creating waves as new high-tech domains that incorporate music and blogs as a way to soften the blow of blatant sex.

Savvy members who know good sex hire professional photographers to take their pictures specifically for online and email use as they (members) continue to walk out the door, leaving sites like Gay.com, Myspace, Craigslist, and AOL to find their new glory hole in the labyrinth of the net.

“Yet many of us have been missing real guidance about how to feel good about going online and be proud of the quirks that make us beautiful,” says Steven Underhill, a renowned gay photographer based in San Francisco, adding “It is tough out there and you have to maximize on this intense visual medium.”

It is true that photographs of a natural, good-looking man can melt you away. Exaggerated poses kill a man’s natural beauty (which you see a lot online these days).

“Men are more attractive if they are uncontrived. They look more natural and even better without makeup, pluck or shave anything,” says a die-hard fan of Dlist adding “especially when they are lightly pumped up – a healthy sporty types like the two drop-dead gorgeous young pilots, Ralph and Danny, in Pearl Harbor.
It is true that romance and love are very personal, and yet many people create their profiles in minutes, using photos with bad lighting or not filling out any information about who they truly are as a person.
Jay Manuel, one of Tyra Banks’ favorite stylists, encourages people to recognize how truly remarkable they are on the inside and shares all his celebrity tips and tricks on Match.com’s Portrait Toolkit so people can look and feel like a star online.

We all must really drop to our knees and give thanks to ourselves -- brave homos of apparently inexhaustible energy who have put together millions of ads on all things queer on the net. Even if you find the net a tad overwhelming, our ads (good or bad, for better or worse) can guide you into the world of sinful pleasures.

Just like us, sex sites are improving themselves too, giving us more sophisticated outfit, more options, cool special features, and statistics on the number of members online and many of them are even offering to assist us with resizing our photographs if they were too big.

And yet there are still many of us using our old pictures and sending out blurry face shots, wasting other people’s time.

What do we do when a guy shows up at our door looking 20 years older or nothing like his photo?

“It used to be very ugly. People slammed doors on them. But we are getting classier nowadays. Today people are realizing that it really doesn’t hurt to be polite and honest,” says a member of Craigslist, adding it is always better to tell the truth and be honest in such a situation.

However, not all men show up looking differently. Infact, many of them are genuinely interested in meeting other people and looking for love.

“I cannot begin to explain how surreal this all is. When I decided to broaden my hunt for someone to share my life with, I never thought it would lead me here,” says a member of Dlist (who recently found a guy that look exactly like his photo), adding “there are many great features to enjoy and so many profiles to view and to date thousands have also viewed my profile.”

I am not sure as to what the average is, but to say that I am not jealous of this guy is an understatement!

With online competition fiercer than ever, there is still a place, we gay people can run to and find our piece of meat in this crazy world. Sex sites continue to make our lives better in 2007, rule our “heads” like it or not, rock our world. Go crazy!


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ARTICLE ON EDGE NEW YORK

Hooking Up: Paid Vs. Free Online Sites
by Ambrose Aban
EDGE News Contributor
Friday Mar 9, 2007


One very happy gay man in America said it all on a recent night--"This site is like an ice cream shop! I’ve tried many different flavors of men and can’t get enough! It’s sex 24/7"--in his personal endorsement for Outpersonals.com. The confession is charged with high-voltage sexual emotion. The surge of guilty pleasure in that admission presses all the right buttons in a cruiser: excitement, expectation, and anticipation: "It’s sex 24/7."

Chalk up another happy customer--that, and the effectiveness of the viral marketing that site directors are employing, as well as the tactical campaigns and more special features--to keep eyeballs, profiles and dollars streaming into paid hook-up sites. All this is drawing traffic to their sites in spite of competition from a raft of ad-supported free sites that have been gnawing at their heels. The key, they all agree, lies in customer service. That, and integrity.

Hooking up on the ’Net is only continuing to grow in popularity, much to the chagrin of bar owners and club promoters, who have been loudly complaining to the media about the encroachment on their turf. The devoted users--and those not overly frustrated by the many flakes, fakes and nutcases who populate many of the sites on any given night--believe this is the way to find sex. Certainly, the reality after the virtual can be just as painful as in the old days of bars and bathhouses. Hooking up is not always pleasant. We still have to deal with losers, flakers, picture-collectors, guys who sent you other people’s pictures to get yours, crystal tweakers, not to mention the inevitable trip across town only to hear "Sorry, this isn’t going to work out."

What draws so many of us to hook-up sites is the promise of sex 24/7. No last calls, no bar tabs, no loud music. But probably nothing more than a casual encounter, either.

"People turn to sex sites because it’s easier than ever before to indulge and find friends with benefits, often without guilt or repercussion. Despite reports, you probably won’t become addicted to hook-up sites. But if you’re looking for love, you’re out of luck," says a proud member of Gaydar.com.

The best sex sites give us an instant, indefinable sense of belonging to a community, no matter how superficial or virtual. When we hook up, we don’t think of ourselves as a part of a niche market. It is more like being a member of our own private club. When we go online it is a fiercely personal act, and we can instantly tell whether someone is our type or not by the site they prefer.

"It is absolutely a coordinated package," says Steven Underhill, a San Francisco-based author and photographer. "People should understand that the medium is so visual, and they are wasting a lot of time online not showing themselves in the best of light," adds Underhill.

Gay.com, then AOL, ruled the dating (and sex) sites in the ’90s. They served up fresh meat 24/7 and dominated the hook-up options with detailed profiles of men of all ages, shapes and sizes. For a glorious moment in the ’90s, an awed world looked to the sex superpowers. New sex sites (even some dating sites) followed in their footsteps.

Newer influential sites included Manhunt.com, Adam4adam.com, HornyMatches.com, Gaydar.com, Men4now.com, Outpersonals, and M4m-usa.com. Men use them to troll for erotic chat or email, discreet relationships, serious relationships, one-on-one sex, group sex, bondage and discipline, cross-dressing, other fetishes, exhibition/voyeurism, sadism/masochism, and any other kinds of "alternative" activities.

The world’s newest premier escort and masseur directory site, MenOnTime.com, is premiering now. It offers masseurs and escorts free access to post ads on the site. Paid sites, however, continue to offer special deals to attract more members and to add pressure to their competition, the free sites. Competition is keen for advertising dollars. The ultimate winner in this war of attrition is the consumer.

The losers for now appear to be the older players like Gay.com, AOL, and Craigslist. Men now expect real-time (RT) online rather than leaving messages and waiting for e-mail responses. Manhunt began the real battle when it hired a cruise director, Michael Alvear--sex columnist, much loved co-host of HBO’s The Sex Inspector and tutor of the best-selling gay sex advice book, Men Are Pigs But We Love Bacon--to enhance its "flavors" of men. "Michael Alvear is here to help you hawk on Manhunt’s hotties!" screams its front page.

"We always give our members what they are always looking for--give them a very simple, easy-to-use site loaded with thousands of guys who are searching for hot sex, friendship, relationships, community, and much more," says Michael MacDonald, Manhunt’s promotions manager. "The site is also tailored to each member’s location and you can search for members all around the world. If we can make our members’ experience as easy and accommodating as possible, we know that they’ll stick around and tell their friends about us. Of course we also do standard marketing such as print and web advertising, event sponsorships, etc, so there’s a good mix."

Manhunt is focusing now on international expansion. The site’s owners have already hired specialists in various languages and cultures from around the world. It is also looking to maintain and strengthen its domestic member sign-ups, so there will always be fresh faces for our members to see. From time to time, Manhunt runs specials for discounted or limited-time free-access memberships and as an incentive to visit the site. Lately, Manhunt discovered that social networking sites such as MySpace.com are a great way to attract guys who may not have known about the site.

Manhunt’s full access membership offers access to cool features like an expanded buddy list and its advance search options. Members can exchange unlimited e-mails with 900,000 members and look at over 3 million pictures in full size. Unlike Adam4Adam (two public and one private pictures), Manhunt members are allowed to post more pictures. Non-paying members (or "guests," as they are called) can access up to three pages a day plus a couple of e-mail exchanges before they are asked to purchase or refill their pass.

Adam4Adam, on the other hand, is free to all. Adam4Adam is targeting the black and Hispanic market, although not exclusively. Out of over 800 personal sites (heterosexual and otherwise) in the U.S., an article in the Middletown, N.Y., Times Herald-Record cites Adam4Adam. In December 2006, Hitwise ranked it among the top 10 such hook-up sites. Two years ago, the San Jose Mercury News ranked it as the second most popular online gay personals site in the country.

The site was launched at the end of 2003 and is operated by A4A Network Inc. Although the site has members of all ethnic groups, the percentage of non-white men represented in member profiles is far higher than the percentage of non-whites in the U.S. population. Unlike Manhunt, Adam4Adam is entirely free. Instead, Adam4Adam derives its revenues exclusively from advertising, mostly adult pay-per-view videos.

One potential competitor on the horizon for Adam4Adam might be Megamates.com. It had zero pop-ups and zero ads on a recent viewing. But the site is growing in popularity among guys on the "DL" (down low), because the site is totally private. This could make the next generation of online hook-up sites-at least among married men.

Manhunt has been adding to its site, however. It now offers a "plan-a-trip feature" to locate potential friends or dates for travelers. It also allows for posting party invitations. The site provides a "Health Resource" page as well as a page devoted to "Online Safety Tips." The site encourages health organizations to create "Health Counselor" accounts. All these measures encourage safe sex-something other sites sometimes give more lip service to than aggressively offer information to members.

"There are certainly stigmas that arise from running a ’sex-positive’ site and we always ask them to do it safely", MacDonald explains. He says that Manhunt is now working directly with over 150 health organizations worldwide with profiles that members can e-mail directly and ask questions to find out information in the strictest confidentially. Manhunt also works with researchers by providing free banner space to advertise studies and testing groups to help find new treatments for various STDs. In some locations, Manhunt has even collaborated with health departments and allowed them to perform confidential partner notifications services. All of these services are completely free for members.

"One thing that we are very clear about is our stance in drugs. We do not allow any mention of illegal substances on Manhunt, even phrases such as ’PNP’ [’party and play,’ code for crystal meth use] are strictly forbidden," MacDonald says. "All profiles are approved by out customer support team and any references of this nature are flagged and removed."

But are Adam4Adam and other such sites merely places to hook up for sex? The Washington Blade explored the evolution of online dating. It reported that such sites "provide just as easy an opportunity for men to find a coffee date as a gangbang."

What about the membership fees at Manhunt? "We have had the same pricing structure for the last five years," MacDonald says. "No one at Manhunt is certain for now when the fees will be increase or by how much, but it will be very reasonable." Today Manhunt offers $10 for a 30-day access pass or $25 for a 90-day pass. Subscribers who bought the passes recently are getting a one-year subscription to a national gay magazine as well.

While the competition between Manhunt and Adam4Adam is heating up, other free sites like Bigmuscle.com also market themselves by going after a particular demographic niche--in this case, guys with big muscles only. The site’s creators, Bill Sanderson and Andy Wysocki, want to concentrate on the big-muscle market and please it all the way. Their attitude comes across clearly. "We have an affiliated site, www.normalguy.com, just for ’normal’ guys," says Wysocki on BigMuscle’s About page.

Originally started as a hobby in San Francisco in 1999, BigMuscle is a place on the Internet exclusively for guys with big muscles to post photos of their physiques and to meet similarly built men. Over the years, BigMuscle has evolved into much more and it is now a global community of tens of thousands of fit men who use the web site as a key element of their social life. "We may have grown over the years but we remain true to our mission," Wysocki says. "We are committed to providing a free online community for adult males who enjoy fitness. We are not a big corporation charging high membership fees as other websites do."

Instead, they operate using the same business model as, say, National Public Radio or PBS. Simply stated, they work to fund their web site through advertisements and donations. "If you enjoy the web site, and you’d like to support it, please donate any amount that won’t put a strain on your budget," pleads Wysocki. "We are so proud of BigMuscle and the fine community of people who make it what it is. As two gay men, our hobby became a small business for us, and we are pleased that our business is one that serves our community."

Many sites are combining the paid and free model.

Visitors can join Outpersonals.com for free. The site had a whopping 8,000 members online recently, although it is a partly international site. For a fee, members get to the top of the site search, unlimited contacts, advance searches, faster profile reviews and more responses.

On a recent night, Hornymatches logged 36,427 profiles from Georgia, 18,114 in Alabama, and 2,830 in Wyoming. It has had more success than its creators in Belgium said they anticipated. It has registered over 50,000 members. The site is pure hook-up. "Finally, I’m able to have sex without the baggage that comes with a normal relationship," one gay member enthused in their own promotional spots. "I’ve never thought this would be possible. I’m actually picking out partners to have sex with and its working!"

Just as immensely popular is Passion.com (with 762,794 listings in New York and 23,461,547 total members). This free site also houses people who want to have sex, watch thousands of naughty video profiles, play in its exclusive chat rooms and IM (instant messager) 24/7. Members can also express their passion in Bondage.com (Passion’s new sister). Created for those with fetishes (members are aware of the site’s well earned reputation within the BDSM community) members can even make money by driving traffic to the site via its new incentive program.

Meanwhile, on Craigslist.org and Gay.com on a recent night, gay, bi and "curious" continue to look for sex. Craig Newmark, the founder and head of Craigslist, successfully used a commonsense, down-to-earth approach to make the site more personal and authentic, while advocating social responsibility through the promotion of small, non-profit organizations.

M4M-usa.com, arguably the oldest online meat market still in existence today, has about 700,000 profiles. On a recent night, 8,000 men were online. It is a paid site that began in 1997. Aside from marking its 10th anniversary, "March is also the month we begin installation of the most extraordinary site changes since we first required that every ad must have a photo back in 1998. The changes will be simpler for members to use," says its site director, Steven Alexander. "The changes will alter access to M4M-usa.com, and we need to insure that we can maintain site speed and access with a much heavier load factor."

Men4now is also definitely hard to ignore these days. With a tagline Point, Click and Cruise, it calls on visitors to check out the goings-on in its site. Its success did not surprise site developers and marketing strategists.

Recon.com specializes in fetish, with 400,000 paid members. Most of the site is devoted to standard fetish scenes: B/D, S/M, watersports, and so on. But there are also other interests, such as "men in suits" (a sexual fetish unto itself, actually).

And, if length (and size) matters, click on paid site Bigcockworld.com. Here you will definitely find some big and long stuff like its competitor, Hungguyz.com, where thousands of well-endowed men, get free lifetime membership. (Although, on a recent visit, I had no trouble getting onto the site without "proving" any exceptional endowment, so one wonders how the filter-for want of a better word-works in this case.)

Early evidence suggests that as the number of niche sites grows, people grow with them, too. It’s a long shot to find compatibility and mutual chemistry and all the other bedeviling and bedazzling intangibles that make the sparks fly. But even if that’s absent, there are pleasures in encountering others and having sex with them while waiting for Mr. Right to come along.


Caught between the moon and New York City which he calls home since 2000, Ambrose Aban wrote for Malaysia, Singapore and Bangkok Tatler, reviewed restaurants and wrote special ad supplement, "Christopher Street", for HX Magazine New York, contributed to leading English dailies in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore. Ambrose loves giving up the secrets of everything from where to find the most delicious Orange Glazed Peking Duck to how to prepare extravagant chic soirees in the city.