BY NOREEN FAGAN - Customs and immigration officials just love to give themselves a bad name. I respect them – they wear uniforms – but I do wonder how some of them got their jobs.

On Monday, March 28, US immigration officials declared that they would no longer automatically reject green-card applications from foreign spouses of gay and lesbian citizens. 

You mean queer families might be able to stay together in the US rather than immigrate to Canada? No: by Wednesday, March 30, immigration officials had reneged on the deal, saying they had not made any policy changes that would provide an opening for gay couples.

The confusion comes in the wake of US president Barak Obama's determination that the US Defense of Marriage Act – the 1996 law that bars federal recognition of same-sex marriages – is unconstitutional. In an unexpected shift, he directed the US Justice Department to stop defending the law in court.

  

That was on Feb 24 to be precise. Since then gays and lesbians in the US have had their hopes raised, raised a little bit more, then unceremoniously dashed.

I have a particular interest in the American flip-flop: my partner is a US citizen and I am, of all things, Zambian. We lived with our two sons in the US, waiting and hoping to be recognized in the same way heterosexual couples are. We weren't, and so, like so many other bi-national couples, we immigrated to Canada.

Canada's immigration and citizenship services can be annoying – activists had to fight to have gays and their rights included in the handbook for new immigrants, for example – but at least Canada is open to allowing bi-national couples to live and work here.

But if it were up to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, things might be different. Have you seen this video of Harper in 2005 at an anti-gay-marriage rally? Watch it. It will make you want to vote.

 

I love films. I can happily sit for hours watching B-rated movies — especially gay and lesbian ones. They are normally badly acted, under budgeted and lacking in good lesbian sex scenes.

With the Inside Out Toronto LGBT Film Festival just two months away, I found myself looking at news clips on new queer-themed films. In doing so, I found a report by the BBC on a recent survey by the UK Film Festival — which officially closes its doors on April 1 — that gays and lesbians feel they're stereotyped in films. Almost three-quarters of lesbian, gay and bisexual audiences believe that films focus on queers as having problems rather than being everyday people. Gay men said they were depicted too frequently as being camp while lesbians said they were portrayed as male fantasies and sexually aggressive.

Really?

Every queer film I see portrays lesbians as tall, beautiful, dressed in designer clothes and wealthier than their gay counterparts. Sex is usually relegated to one pathetic kissing scene, which can hardly be seen as playing into men’s fantasies.

I hope that this year’s film circuit will put an end to that.

The London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival opens on April 1 in the UK; a few of the chosen films are already making waves.

For lesbians, the film to see is Gigola — described by the Guardian as a blend of pulp and soft porn. Set in the 1960s, a “stylish butch, Gigola” entices “pretty femmes away from their pimps, breaking hearts and making a few enemies along the way.”

Guys can break away from camp portrayals (not that there's anything wrong with camp) with the House of Boys, which looks like a great bet. The film follows Frank in Amsterdam as he finds a home in a “bar cum brothel.”

Moving away from London and into Malaysia, there are reports that a gay film called Dalam Botol is generating controversy. In it a Muslim man undergoes a sex-change operation because he thinks it will please his boyfriend. The two hug but do not kiss and are played by straight men.

In a country that still maintains a law against sodomy, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, the film has been accepted by a general audience. However, it is not popular with gay, lesbian and transgender folks, who feel they are portrayed as unhappy with their sexuality.

If you're in Toronto and are thinking about volunteering for Inside Out, representatives will be at The 519 April 10 for a big, queer volunteer fair. And in the meantime, here's the Gigola trailer to whet your appetite...

 

  

Look out Canada: the next month is going to be dirty. It seems that the run-up to the election is going to be punctuated by attack ads and negative campaigning.

I thought the Conservative Party was the only one that would stoop to negative advertising — until yesterday. After months of enduring the Conservatives' insidious claims that Michael Ignatieff is a traitor to his country, the Liberal Party has obviously decided that it will not take the high road.

 

Both the Conservatives and Liberals have new ads ready to hit TV screens over the next 36 days.

The one I watched says Stephen Harper has gone too far. A woman’s voice catalogues Harper’s errors over the years while newspaper clippings zigzag across the screen highlighting various parliamentary scandals.

Abuse, conceit and contempt for Canadians is the thread of the ad. In my opinion it may well be the theme of the next month.  

 

I came across this piece on Towleroad that includes video of a lesson on homosexuality from an Indiana Catholic School:

Brr. If you listen carefully you can actually hear my skin crawl... Check out more video installments on the Towleroad link above.

The sum total of classroom time devoted to homosexuality I experienced as a student at an Ontario public school in the 1980s was precisely 20 seconds. My Grade 10 gym teacher – with beads of sweat on his upper lip and a nervous tremor in his voice – told us during our human sexuality unit that some of us boys might masturbate to climax eventually, and that some of us might even feel a little attracted to other boys. "But don't worry," he said. "You'll grow out of both quickly." By then I was already climaxing all over the place and thinking about boys every second I wasn't thinking about food. I never really did grow out of either. Outside of class, homosexuality seemed just about all everyone talked about... "faggot" this and "homo" that. 

Anyway, check out Xtra's current work on GSAs in Ontario's Catholic schools. 

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Speaking of homosexuality, check out this little essay from salon.com about straight men fingering the erotic pleasures of their own back passages. I’m not sure I believe that anal sex is more fashionable than it used to be, but there’s something lovely about the idea of straight guys figuring out how to play with their bums because all the cool kids are doing it.

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Lady Gaga has released a nifty countrified/easy-listening version of "Born This Way."

And a cutie dyke uses another Gaga tune to win the Danish edition of X Factor...

And from now on every time I write about Lady Gaga I think I’ll include mention of her appearance in Xtra's Toronto sister, fab magazine, just before she got too big for us.

A week after that vid and the below fab cover image was shot, Gaga performed in New York's Times Square on New Year's Eve and that was it. I like to think fab pushed her over the top ;-) Perhaps you'll chat with us again one day, m'lady.

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Kd lang is going to tour in the land of Aus. And she’s got a few Canadian dates this summer for Winnipeg, Kelowna and Burnaby.

BY MATT MILLS – Scientists in China say they can turn mice gay by lowering serotonin levels in mouse brains. Straight guys at Hooters have found that chicken wings fortify hetero-normative conceptions of masculinity, while celery stalks can lead to sexy gay kissing.

I suddenly have the urge for something healthy and crunchy.

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Got a few xtra bucks and looking for something to do in Toronto this Sunday evening? Well, it's time for the AIDS Committee of Toronto's (ACT) 10th annual SNAP! photographic fundraiser. It includes a live auction, silent auction and photo competition. It will be held at the National Ballet School, one of the niftiest venues in Toronto for this kind of event. ACT needs you. 

This piece from the event's online gallery caught my eye...

 

 

 

It's called Mindtrap and it's by Patrick Lightheart.  It's big too: 40 X 40. *Sigh*

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The horrifying anti-gay Ugandan bill was shelved before it reached a vote. 

Check out some of Xtra's past work on Uganda...

US evangelicals and Uganda's anti-gay bill.

David Kato memorial in Vancouver

Xtra reports from Uganda

One man's adventures in Uganda

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I noticed this piece from The Guardian last night about novelist, producer and movie and television star Dirk Bogarde.

Bogarde has been dead for years, but he became a huge star in the UK in the early 1940s. He was a prominent actor there as Western Europe recovered from World War II, entered the Cold War and the masses embraced television. He was a hot, creative man, and he was also a sister with an amazing moral compass.

I first laid eyes on Bogarde in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s 1996 documentary film, The Celluloid Closet. One of the films profiled in that doc is Bogarde’s 1961 film, Victim. In it Bogarde plays a handsome, successful married solicitor who becomes enmeshed in a blackmail scandal after a young male friend commits suicide. The film is about gay men living in the shadows, afraid of being outed, subject to all kinds of victimization because gay sex is criminal and taboo.

Dum-dum-daaaa! C'mon, give it a chance, it was a different time.

Victim is a complicated story in which all is not as it initially seems. It is one of earliest mass-market films that refers openly and directly to homosexuality. And it changed social mores in the UK, contributing partly to the success of the movement to decriminalize gay sex in that country and opening the way for the same here in Canada.

The DVD release of Victim includes a 1961 press interview Bogarde gave about the film and his life. It’s fascinating.

Wow, here's the whole thing…

Sometimes I think I was born 50 years late.

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From the Toronto Star on Friday: High school clerk gets spanked for porn video.