Latest News Roundup - All posts tagged 'hockey'
Thursday, May 27, 2010

Brian Burke talks bullying at MyGSA.ca launch

Maple Leafs GM Brian Burke spoke at last week's launch of mygsa.ca, a new website by Egale Canada for queer youth and educators. 

The folks at mygsa.ca uploaded Burke's remarks to YouTube today. Check it out:

 
From mygsa.ca: "At the end of this video, Burke asked that the cameras be turned off so that he could speak more intimately about his late son, Brendan. Not shown in this video is the rousing standing ovation he received at the end of his address."
 


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Thursday, May 13, 2010

Anti-homophobia poster too hot for Quebec's Videotron

Ah, hockey. Canada's favourite sport is no stranger to these pages! Remember when rightwing Christian groups were outraged that the Maple Leafs allowed their logo to be used in a gay hockey film? Yikes.

Let's add another story to Xtra's "hockey hall of shame," shall we? 

Videotron, a subsidiary of Quebecor Media, has reportedly removed an anti-homophobia poster from its Quebec City office. The timing isn't great because... well, it's never a great time to rip down anti-homophobia posters. But Monday, May 17, is International Day Against Homophobia!

According to La Soleil, company management decided to yank the poster from a union bulletin board after receiving three complaints from employees. That's all it takes? Three complaints?

Management have been asked to put the poster back up, but they have not done so, says Bruno Tremblay of the Canadian Union of Public Employees

A Videotron spokesperson told Canoe that the bulletin board can only be used for union news, so management had no choice but to remove the poster. Which begs the question: why not just move the poster to another wall?

The yanked poster is part of a series aimed at fighting homophobia in sports. Take a look at the full-size version of the image -- their lips are barely touching! 

Some of the other posters in the campaign are... frankly, not very gay at all. Take a peek:

Check out homophobiaday.org for more on International Day Against Homphobia.

Read more:


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Saturday, November 28, 2009

Watch: Brendan Burke talks about homophobia and hockey

Brendan Burke made waves in the sports world when he publicly came out this week. The 20-year-old son of Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke has reignited a national discussion on homophobia in sports.

TSN spoke to Brendan Burke and his father this week. "Things like gay slurs... I think once players realize that there could be a gay person next to them or that there are gay people around them — they'll stop using it," says Brendan Burke. 

Watch the TSN segment below:

 
The Globe & Mail spoke with Brendan Burke for an interview -- read it here.
 
Meanwhile, check out the comments on the original ESPN article that broke Brendan Burke's coming-out story. TSN responds to viewer reactions to the Burke interview.
 
Read more on Xtra.ca:


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Thursday, January 29, 2009

Awesome or Awful?

Like I said the other day, it's a thin line -- one man's trash, another man's treasure and all that.  Here's a few examples as you get to choose:  Awesome or Awful?

-- Dan Savage's readers have chosen the new definition for the word "saddleback"

-- Radical queer theorists say that gay marriage will inevitably make gay men hopelessly dull and they are, of course, correct.  Look what happened on this game show -- is it cultural progress or decay? Awesome or awful?


-- Iceland is replacing its failed conservative government with a socialist one led by their first lesbian Prime Minister. This would be entirely Awesome if the country weren't bankrupt and she'll likely be replaced in May. Their word for 'awful' is 'ógurlegur.'

-- Adorable jazz-pop duo The Bird and The Bee (love the new single!) have done a cover of Rihanna's "Don't Stop the Music:"

-- Two words:  Bacon Explosion!

-- "Hockey Night in Canada" commentators have coined the term "pansification."  I can't decide if I want to use it in every sentence I can over the next week or if these homophobic gits clearly have no business trying to use so many syllables at once. 

-- David Beckham as good luck charm:



-- A California appeals court has ruled in favour of a Christian school that expelled two girls because they seemed like lesbians.  Actually, there's not a trace of Awesome here, it's just Awful.  What the fuck is going wrong in California???

-- This Bollywood safe-sex video is seven minutes long:

-- A mom in Lincoln, NE threw a party for her underage daughters and bought them each a keg of beer. I just love this bit from the local news report: "there was so much alcohol in the home that the breathalyzers used by officers recorded a .03 just from the air"

-- We're now being told that blonde, brittle MSNBC reporter Andrea Mitchell is "a gay icon."  Seriously?  Even after Britney and Paris, are we this desperate?  I'm gonna go with Awful on this one, but you may disagree...

 


Friday, October 24, 2008

Time for drastic measures

It's bad enough we'll have to endure all the perky marketing for 'High School Musical 3' this weekend but now comes word that Zac Efron will costar in 'Pirates of the Caribbean 4.' Johnny Depp has joked that Captain Jack Sparrow would love having a cabin boy around but, after sitting through those horrible 'Pirate' sequels, even the notion of Depp buggering Efron senseless won't be enough to get me in the theatre!

Swedish hockey player Jan Huokko was embarrassed earlier this summer when a clip of a sex tape he made with his girlfriend ended up on the internet. During a game on Tuesday, fans for the rival team taunted Huokko by waving a giant inflatable penis and tossing dozens of dildos onto the ice. Huokko took it in stride ("I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of") but the Zamboni driver has been looking pretty happy ever since.

I never realized that Al Gore's eco-documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth' is a remake -- Frank Capra produced his own documentary on climate change...in 1958!

The fight to preserve same-sex marriage in California -- as residents prepare to vote on the anti-gay Proposition 8 -- is getting weird and ugly:
- Prop 8 supporters are claiming that gay marriage leads to child prostitution!
- over three-quarters of the $23-million raised to stop marriage equality in California is coming from the Mormon church in Utah, in an attempt to make evangelical Christians less alarmed by their magic underwear
- when a Mormon family plastered the front of their house with a massive 'Yes on 8' sign, a lesbian couple parked their SUV in front with "Bigots live here" written on it
- the 'Yes on 8' and 'Protect Marriage' campaigns are sending out letters demanding equivalent money from businesses that have donated to the 'No' groups fighting for gay marriage. "It is only fair for Proposition 8 supporters to know which companies and organizations oppose traditional marriage," says one letter but the owner of a real estate business calls it "blackmail" and says, "We're not caving...we'll support our employees. We're going to support the freedom to marry, a fundamental right to do what we can to make sure it's not taken away."

In such a highly-charged atmosphere leading up to the election, Oscar-winning director and former 'Happy Days' star Ron Howard thinks Obama should get the vote -- and he's going to ridiculous lengths to show it:


Meanwhile, it almost seems like John McCain has given up. It's hard enough to fight Obama while being saddled with Sarah Palin but now his idiot brother is making things worse!

Since everyone's talking about Palin's $150,000 wardrobe (even FOX News except they're fine with it), the Republicans will be desperate to focus on other things. One blog got a hold of some leaked campaign ads:

Seeing that in print is always ugly. And I'm not keen on the word 'faggots' either.

With all this going on, beloved gay humourist David Sedaris has lost his patience with "the undecided voters": "To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. 'Can I interest you in the chicken?' she asks. 'Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?' To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked." 

But hey, enough politics -- it's the weekend!  Time to get out there and dance!  And here's one guy who's been practicing:

 


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The Roundup

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Andrea Houston
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Natasha Barsotti
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