Jerusalem's Only Gay Bar Closes Its Doors

JERUSALEM - The owner of the only gay nightclub in the Israeli capital decided this week to call it quits apparently due to the establishment's failure to turn a large enough profit.
The Shushan nightclub was as much a political and ideological statement as it was a business. But owner Saar Netanel told Ha'aretz that "with all due respect to ideology, ideology does not pay the rent or municipal taxes."
Netanel insisted that Shushan had plenty of patrons, including individuals from the traditionally anti-homosexual Orthodox Jewish and Muslim Arab communities. However, downtown Jerusalem is home to a large number of thriving bars and nightclubs, so it was difficult to understand how one that was purportedly flush with clientele could not remain in business.
Netanel noted that it is difficult for one to flaunt his or her homosexuality in Jerusalem, where two-thirds of the population is comprised of the aforementioned Orthodox and Muslim communities, and many of the rest maintain a more conservative or traditional outlook than those in other parts of the country.
Earlier this year, Jerusalem's tiny gay and lesbian community forced itself upon the rest of the city by holding an outlandish "gay pride" parade through the streets of the holy city. Jewish, Muslim and Christian leaders - including Evangelical Christian leaders abroad - decried what they called the desecration of Jerusalem and urged the Israeli authorities to not allow the parade.
from Israel Today

Harry Potter Stars React To Gay Twist

The stars of the Harry Potter films have been giving their reaction to JK Rowling's revelation last month that the one of her characters, Hogwarts school headmaster, Albus Dumbledore, is gay.
"I thought it was hilarious," said Daniel Radcliffe, who has played the lead role in all five Harry Potter films.
He said actor Michael Gambon, who has played Dumbledore since the third film, had been "really camping it up for the last three weeks ever since he found out".
Rowling announced that Dumbledore was gay to a packed house in New York's Carnegie Hall as part of her US book tour in October.
Radcliffe told BBC News: "JK Rowling is an incredibly intelligent woman. She can't have thought for a moment that that would go down well in the Bible Belt of America, but she put it brilliantly herself: 'He's my character - I can do what I want with him.' Which I think is fair enough."
David Yates, who directed the fifth Harry Potter film - Order of the Phoenix - said he was told in September by JK Rowling during a read-through for the next film on the set of the Great Hall at Hogwarts.
"Jo leaned over to me and said: 'You know Dumbledore's gay don't you, David?' And I thought 'Wow that's pretty cool'."
Yates, who was speaking at the press launch of the Phoenix DVD, added: "He's a wonderful character, Dumbledore - graceful, wise, powerful, quirky, terrific sense of humour, loves knitting. There's a jumble of things in there and his sexuality is just another thing."
Filming on the sixth film in the franchise, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, began in September, with Yates again at the helm. But he said not to expect any changes to the way Dumbledore is portrayed on film.
"Michael Gambon hasn't changed his approach. A person's sexuality is just one part of who they are, and so it hasn't really shifted where we're taking him."
Producer David Barron confirmed that Dumbledore would remain "the character Michael Gambon has already established".
But he added: "Michael's camped it up a bit off-camera, he's just been amused by it."
Emma Watson, who plays Harry's friend Hermione Granger, said: "It never really occurred to me before, but now JK Rowling's said that he's gay it sort of makes sense."
She added: "I think what surprised everyone was the amount of media attention it's received. I think it's nice that the story has ended but there are still things that people don't know."
Evanna Lynch, who plays the part of eccentric student Luna Lovegood, said she had always thought that a younger Dumbledore would have made an ideal partner for Luna.
"If only Dumbledore was a 100 years younger they would be perfect, and I put that to JK Rowling," she said.
"But as we know now, that's never going to happen."
from The BBC

Gay? Who cares?

Last Tuesday, the New York Times ran a front-page story on the diminishing allure of gay enclaves in the United States. The next day, the San Francisco Chronicle published a Page 1 story explaining how same-sex couples in California are a lot more socioeconomically and ethnically diverse -- read: less white and less wealthy -- than you might believe. The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School will release a report today by demographer Gary Gates that all but poses the question: Is gay the new straight?
Gates' research on U.S. Census data drives home a point that the gay vanguard has been wrestling with for a while: The hedonistic, transgressive, radical ethos (and stereotype) that once characterized gay culture doesn't represent reality anymore. The decline of urban coastal gay communities, the increase in the gay population in the interior U.S. and the overall diversification of the gay population are facts. What's more, Gates argues, these trends are a function of the growing acceptance of homosexuality among the American public.
Acceptance? Really? Has Gates forgotten about the 45 states that have laws or constitutional amendments barring same-sex marriage, or the anti-gay discrimination bill that is stalled in Congress and faces opposition from the White House?
Not at all. There is, he says, a vocal, virulent -- and sometimes violent -- anti-gay movement, but it doesn't negate decades of opinion surveys that show a marked increase in tolerance in most Americans' attitudes toward gays and lesbians. In 1998, for example, a Gallup poll found that only 33% of Americans thought that homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal. By 2007, that figure had risen to 59%.
Growing acceptance of homosexuality means a decline in social stigma associated with same-sex relationships, and a consequent shift in the politics of coming out. The more people come out, the more accepting people are around them, and the more accepting the public becomes, the more people come out.
Gates' study shows that the number of openly gay couples in the U.S. has quadrupled since 1990, and the biggest increases are in the country's more socially conservative areas.
Utah is the poster state. Between 1990 and 2006, for example, it went from having the 38th-highest concentration of same-sex couples in the country to 14th highest. In that same time period, the percentage of gay couples who lived in large cities declined from 45% to 23%. Even more counterintuitive, from 2000 to 2006, states that banned same-sex marriage had above-average increases in the number of gay couples. And places where voter referendums went against same-sex marriages saw even larger increases.
Some of the growth in the number of openly gay couples in conservative areas could be because of migration. And yes, some on-the-barricades members of the gay rights movement have gotten older and mellower and moved out to the heartland. But the larger trend is simply that as more gays come out, they don't need to change or assimilate to fit into the mainstream because they are already very much a part of it.
"The demographic characteristics of the gay population are converging with those of the mainstream," Gates says. If you're from a state like Utah or Nebraska, chances are you're going to share a lot with your neighbors whether you're straight or gay: "They're rural," Gates says, "they're religious, and they're Republican."
So what does this all mean for American culture at large?
"Society is beginning to say that being gay is not such a big deal," Gates says. "What that means for gays is that homosexuality won't have the centrality to their identity it once did. Being gay then becomes one of a variety of an individual's competing identities."
In other words, as the challenges associated with coming out diminish, so does the primacy of the identity that that act of self-discovery and self-assertion once forged. It means that the culture once associated with gay identity becomes less distinctive from the mainstream.
Gates doesn't believe that these trends spell an end of gay "associational" life. The process he's describing is not unlike the one experienced by so many immigrant or minority groups in America that fought against discrimination, moved beyond their enclaves and then felt a little sad that they lost the embracing sense of uniqueness and community that they once enjoyed.
As gays meld into the broader population, places like West Hollywood and the Castro district in San Francisco will inevitably lose some of their appeal. As more gays come out in more places, the diversity of homosexual politics and lifestyles will come out with them, and the tolerant will multiply.
For some of the pioneers from the edgy, embattled, ecstatic "good old days," this may be bittersweet. "But isn't that what everyone wanted 20 years ago?" Gates asks. "Just to be treated like everyone else?"
from The Los Angeles Times / Gregory Rodriguez

'POOFTER' License Plate Rejected

VIRGINIA - For 11 years, over nearly 200,000 miles, with the blessing of the state of Virginia, David Phillips has driven his Tracker with the "POOFTER" license plate, and nobody has complained -- not even when he parked at the British Embassy, where everybody knows "poofter" is British slang for a gay man.
"It's always a rolling good laugh for them," says Phillips, who is gay and chose his tags' message because "it's just an amusing word that I self-identify with."
The commonwealth of Virginia is not amused. It gave Phillips his vanity plates in error, Carolyn Easley, coordinator of the special license plates office, wrote in a recent letter. "You may have grown fond of your personalized plates," but they are "socially, racially or ethnically offensive or disparaging" and "you must return them." There was no explanation for why it took Virginia 11 years to figure out what "poofter" means.
They'll have to pry those plates from Phillips's cold dead hands, or something like that. The 42-year-old Arlington County resident, who works as a computer consultant, says he's not sending back the tags, even if the state has generously provided a prepaid envelope for that purpose.
The next step: a hearing in Richmond. But Phillips's chances are not good, because his case has been to the Word Committee, a panel of a dozen Department of Motor Vehicles employees who review vanity plate applications that have either drawn a citizen complaint or been flagged by a computer program that searches proposed plate messages -- forward and backward -- for obscene, explicit, excretory, violent or offensive content.
In Phillips's case, it must have been a citizen complaint that triggered the review because the state doesn't just randomly go back and reconsider plates that have been on the road for years. "We definitely rely on residents to report any inappropriate message," says DMV spokesman Melanie Stokes, who, citing privacy rules, won't comment on how Phillips's tags came in for reinspection.
If you, like Phillips, are amazed that the state would bother to spend tax dollars chasing after vanity plates, you'll want to grab the blood pressure meds before reading this: Hundreds of battles over personalized plates have used up untold government resources in a strange corner of the law that has some of the nation's top courts issuing contradictory rulings.
Ever since 1977, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that New Hampshire could not stop residents from covering up the state's "Live Free or Die" motto on license plates, courts have struggled over who gets to decide what words may go on tags. States have denied drivers messages such as "GVT SUX," "WINE," "PUSHER," "QUICKEE" and even "ATHEIST."
But courts have pushed back: One federal appeals court ordered Missouri to approve "ARYAN-1," saying the state "may not censor a license plate because its message might make people angry." In Vermont, however, a federal appeals court said the state could ban scatological terms because that doesn't involve quashing any viewpoint.
In Virginia, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit prohibited the state from banning a Confederate flag logo on a special license plate for the Sons of Confederate Veterans because that would be viewpoint discrimination.
The state did strip Alice Deighan and her partner, Scout, of their "2DYKES" plates a decade ago; the then-Alexandria residents' appeal was denied.
The lesbian couple's argument was the same as Phillips's. "This is how we identify," says Deighan, a social worker who now lives in Rhode Island. "We obviously weren't calling random motorists 'dykes.' This is what we call ourselves. There are a lot of things in the world that are offensive, but this wasn't one of them. If the word offends you on the road, don't look at it. But the word police wouldn't consider our argument."
Like many Virginians -- the state is No. 3 in the portion of drivers (12 percent) who personalize their plates -- Phillips uses his car to send messages. For a while, he had a sticker that altered the state's 400th anniversary Jamestown plates to say "400 Years of Oppression and Bigotry."
But his vanity plates were always more about having a chuckle over his personal identity than about making any political point. "People have to be into British humor or have some contact with that culture to have any idea what it means," Phillips says. He first heard the word in adolescence while watching Boy George appear on the old Phil Donahue talk show. "Some old British woman gets up and asks, 'So, Boy, when did you realize you were a poofter?' "
Then and now, Phillips found the name funny but hardly offensive. Merriam-Webster says "poofter" is "usually disparaging," and the Oxford English Dictionary calls the word "derogatory slang," but it's routinely aired on broadcast television, and Phillips says it's less disparaging than "nancy boy," which happens to have been his previous license tag message ("NANCBOY," for four years, with no complaint from the state). "Poofter," Phillips contends, "is a pretty neutral word. It gets past any e-mail filter."
Phillips will fight on to Richmond, but, as a realistic fellow, he's also looking ahead: "I wonder what they would do with a word like 'queer.' "
from The Washington Post / Marc Fisher